Chuck vs the Watch
by sharpasamarble
Summary: Season 1 AU. Just when Chuck finally seemed to have figured out things with Sarah, Chuck discovers a frightening secret, making him wonder whom he can trust and triggering events which could have catastrophic consequences for everyone he cares about.
1. Prologue

I'm back! Surprised? I'm a little surprised myself. I guess I just had to write this one.

Real life is a bit of a bear these days, so fair warning: there may be a bit of a delay between chapters. I've got some fairly good draft work done, and thanks to beta-readers like Baylink and MySoapBox, they're in pretty good shape. However, even though I'm ahead of the game right now, there's still a lot of story to write, so I'm going to try to pace my postings.

You've been warned.

Since it's been so long, I've posted a timeline below that shows how things fit together. For those who haven't read the other fanfics or forget how the previous fanfics have gone, this should remind you how the various stories integrate with the TV shows from Season One. The timeline should catch you up on most of the key points, but since the previous stories all play into this one, you may want to go back and re-read them. (Be kind to _Chuck vs Auld Lang Syne_, the first story in the series. It was literally the first thing I'd written in forever, so it's a little rough.)

It should go without saying that the timeline below is rife with spoilers if you haven't read my previous stories.

Now that my disclaimers and shameless plugs are over, enjoy!

**Timeline**

_**Chuck vs the Nemesis (TV)**_

_Bryce returns. Tommy Delgado, Fulcrum operative, tries to get Bryce to rejoin._

_Tommy figures out Chuck is connected to the Intersect._

_Team Chuck captures Tommy._

_Bryce is to go deep undercover. He wants Sarah back, as partner and more. Sarah chooses to stay with Chuck._

_**Chuck vs the Crown Vic (TV)**_

_Team Chuck stops Lon Kirk._

_Buy More __Christmas__ Holiday Party._

_Beckman warns Casey that he may need to eliminate Chuck._

**_Chuck vs Auld Lang Syne (fanfic)_**

_Chuck flashes on a Christmas card sent by a high school classmate._

_Mission: track down Andon Minh, information broker._

_Chuck and Sarah exchange Xmas presents purely for their cover: a watch and a necklace_

_Team Chuck takes down Minh._

_Chuck and Sarah kiss on New Year's Eve._

_The necklace contains a note from Chuck to Sarah, telling her that he trusts her. The watch contains a mysterious microchip._

_**Chuck vs Five Men, One with a Knife (fanfic)**_

_Team Chuck captures and interviews Brent Davis and Jeremy Cushman. They run a small consulting company that Fulcrum has contracted to break into a top-secret CIA server. The server turns out to be the central server for assigning missions to agents across several organizations._

_Given the way the NSA and CIA treat Cushman because of what he knows, Chuck worries that the knowledge in his own head may lead the CIA or NSA to kill him some day._

_Team Chuck takes down Fulcrum operative Black Lightning and his crew, with the exception of Lizzie Shafai, who is suspicious of the Buy More credentials she spots during the raid._

_Jeremy Cushman slated to be killed. Chuck convinces(?) Graham that the CIA would be better served to offer Cushman a job._

_**Chuck vs the Undercover Lover (TV)**_

_Casey helps out an old flame._

_**Chuck vs the Marlin (TV)**_

_Chuck is slated to be moved underground._

_Lizzie Shafai learns Chuck is the Intersect after a month of snooping around the Buy More._

_Lizzie is captured._

_**Chuck vs the Strange Bedfellows (fanfic)**_

_Sarah gets called away on a mission to Venezuela. Bryce Larkin needs her help to investigate Alex Moreno, a Fulcrum agent … and for other things._

_Carina is called in to substitute for Sarah. After Chuck flashes, Carina, Chuck and Casey pursue Jaime Veron, local drug dealer with the Los Mellizos organization out of Colombia._

_Bryce pursues Sarah; Carina pursues Chuck._

_Bryce and Sarah find out that Fulcrum is arranging an alliance with FARC, a leftist guerilla organization for purposes unknown._

_Drew Jennings, a U.S. Representative for the Huntington Beach district, becomes involved with the Veron investigation._

_Bryce and Sarah infiltrate a paramiltary camp, discovering further ties to Los Mellizos. They assassinate one of the key leaders and destroy the relationship between the paramilitary group and Fulcrum, foiling their plans to instigate regime change in Venezuela._

_Chuck, Carina and Casey find Veron's operations and expose them to Jennings._

_Casey accidentally reveals that Sarah is off with Bryce. Chuck believes Sarah is gone for good._

_Chuck sleeps with Carina, only to find out she is Sarah's younger sister._

_Sarah returns to several panicked voice mails from Chuck. Carina shows up at Sarah's apartment on her way out of town; the two fight and talk._

_Sarah kisses Chuck on Valentine's Day._

_**Chuck vs the Scavenger Hunt (fanfic)**_

_Fulcrum searches for several things: a pair of boots, a packet of information (code named Chameleon), Jaime Veron's PDA, Bryce, Sarah and Chuck_

_Devon organizes and launches his annual scavenger hunt for his friends._

_Duty interrupts the fun. Chuck flashes / finds the boots at Black Lightning's hideout._

_Director Graham has built a secure bunker for Chuck at the local CIA facility, but Fulcrum compromises the security in order to obtain Chameleon. Sarah defeats the agents, recovers Chameleon and convinces Graham to delay moving Chuck underground due to the security concerns._

_Chuck and Casey go to Veron's at the request of Drew Jennings. Jennings starts to recruit Casey for Fulcrum. Chuck finds Veron's PDA. The PDA is like the one Bryce used to download the Intersect._

_Chuck sees Sarah run into a building that explodes. It turns out to be an elaborate trap for the Los Mellizos henchmen._

_Sarah asks Chuck to investigate Chameleon. Chuck decodes the book. It contains a list of credentials used by terrorist organizations to contact certain journalists and claim responsibility for acts of terror._

_Chameleon recovered by Fulcrum as Chuck tries to take it to Casey's, but Chuck has enough information that he can pass along two key contacts to General Beckman._

_Chuck uses Buy More tools to break into Veron's PDA; he discovers Fulcrum contacts, including an appointment to rendezvous with a Fulcrum cell. Chuck figures out that Sarah's mission in South America and Team Chuck's efforts in Los Angeles have Los Mellizos as a common bond, something previously undiscovered because the CIA and NSA were not communicating._

_Team Chuck stakes out the rendezvous point. Casey meets Eric Amafor, his ex-partner and now Fulcrum agent, who keeps Casey out of action and tries to continue Casey's recruitment._

_Fulcrum contact at rendezvous asks when they are getting their uranium._

_Team Chuck defeats the Fulcrum cell (except for Amafor) with the help of a mysterious stranger who steals the video of Casey's meeting with Amafor. _

_Los Mellizos henchmen somehow escaped custody. They kidnap Chuck. Sarah pursues. Chuck realizes that Sarah will have no choice but to surrender, and that they'd both be tortured and killed, so he drives the car with him and the henchmen into a ravine. Chuck survives largely intact; the henchmen are nearly killed._

_Sarah reveals that Beckman and Graham are extremely nervous about all the Fulcrum information leaks._

_Sarah tells Chuck that the job will always come first, but she wants what time they have together. She kisses him in full view of anyone who happens to be watching._


	2. Spy Hard

_**Monday, February 18th, 12:10 pm PST, Buy More Parking Lot**_

Whistling a happy tune, Chuck floated across the Buy More plaza parking lot. Sarah Walker had kissed him, and in public no less. This was no chaste cover kiss. This was no a-bomb-is-ticking-down-and-we're-about-to-die kiss. This was a kiss for no other reason than, well, wanting to kiss him, and the job be damned for once.

Chuck giddily sashayed between an import sedan and an SUV. Without really thinking about it, he shot a double Isaac, dual pointing index fingers coupled with a cheesy grin, at a suddenly bewildered woman. She yanked her shopping cart to a halt, threatening to topple both the boxed flat screen TV and the little girl riding shotgun. His grin was so large that there really were only two possible responses: answer with a similar grin or call 911 to see if the local asylum was short one nut case. The pig-tailed girl let out a giggle as her freckled nose wrinkled. Her mother's eyes darted around like she was trying to remember where she'd stashed her phone.

He winked at the little girl as he passed. The sounds of crooked wheels on rough blacktop faded behind him as he crossed another aisle. Impulsively, he stopped in a vacant parking spot. He felt like shouting something to the skies, but words were inadequate. Instead, he simply stretched out his arms to his sides and tilted his head back as he basked in the glow of the midday sun. Clumps of his careless hair shifted slightly in the gentle breeze. He couldn't remember ever being so happy. With a contented sigh, he lowered chin and arms and continued his trek. Work beckoned.

When he went to check his watch, he found only pale skin and the slight jut of his wrist bone. Alarmed, he patted his pockets, but then a small sigh of relief escaped his lips when he remembered that he had dropped the watch off to be fixed that morning. The watch was running fast again, and even though he could track how fast it was running, every time he checked the time he was initially disconcerted. He disliked the sensation that time was somehow slipping away from him.

Sure, the watch was a relatively cheap model with its metal band and hard-to-read LED display seated beneath the more traditional hands. Sure, it had only been a cover gift. Still, it was a gift from Sarah, and as their relationship grew more and more real, the watch grew more and more important to Chuck.

Altering course, he headed, somewhat ironically, for the spy shop across the plaza. His friend Jay should have finished fixing the watch by now. In exchange, Chuck would do a little more work on the store's computer system. Big Mike probably would have had a conniption if he knew Chuck were bartering away services that the spy shop might normally pay Buy More to do, but then again Big Mike had a conniption when the strip mall bakery ran out of danishes.

Behind him, an annoyed voice bellowed, "Bartowski! Where do you think you're going?"

Chuck stopped and turned. John Casey, threatening to have a conniption of his own, stood near the front entrance of the Buy More. He wore his regulation green Buy More polo and his regulation glare. Not one for patience, he broke into a jog, covering huge expanses of ground with each seemingly effortless stride. Short brown hair that received less attention than Chuck's nonetheless remained fixed, as if held in place by sheer force of will. But all that took a back seat to those eyes, manic and commanding, drilling into Chuck like a Texas oilman.

Chuck didn't have any kind of urge to reach for his phone. This particular nut case was on his side, and he was grateful for that.

Casey didn't pull up until he was a little closer than was considered socially acceptable. Chuck returned the man's stare with a practiced calmness. As fun as rattling Casey's cage could be, he decided to pre-empt a blow-up by answering the man's question. "I've got a little work to do over at the spy shop. I should be back in about an hour."

Casey appeared almost determined to find something wrong with that. When he was unable to come up with anything, he seemed to take it personally. "OK, but before you go, we need to have a little chat about Agent Walker."

Chuck swallowed hard. Had Casey seen the kiss? As usual, the man was unreadable. Chuck tried to force himself to relax, with limited success. "Wh-hat about Agent Walker?"

"I'm starting to hear some chatter I don't like. How's she acted towards you since she returned from South America?"

"Constant as the North Star."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Well, what kind of question is that? She's, you know, Sarah. Calm, cool, professional. Always focused on the mission at hand, but occasionally friendly. Same as always."

"How friendly? She hasn't been flirting with you or anything like that, has she?"

"Casey, is there a point to all this?"

Casey glanced around the parking lot. Conspiratorially, he offered, "Something big is coming down. I don't know what it is, but she may be trying to cozy up to you in preparation."

Chuck's mouth was suddenly hanging open. "What, so suddenly we're back to where we were at the beginning, back when Doctor Zarnow was messing with our heads and none of us trusted each other?"

"Things change. Look, I know you slept with Carina, which is neither here nor there. But doesn't it strike you as strange that Sarah wouldn't be bothered that you slept with her sister? Doesn't sound like any woman I've ever known."

"She'd tell me if there was a problem. Sarah has always been honest with me."

"As far as you know. Either one of us could put something by you without breaking a sweat."

Chuck gave Casey a pointed look. "Like you might be doing now?"

"It's your funeral. Word to the wise, Bartowski: don't trust Walker. We both know how you feel about her, but if I'm right and something is about to go down, she'll use your feelings against you. Do yourself a favor and do your thinking with your big head." Casey lowered his gaze meaningfully to Chuck's nether regions before turning and heading back to the Buy More.

When Casey had put some distance between them, Chuck turned and exhaled hard before he continued towards the spy shop. He didn't like hiding things from anyone, let alone Casey. Despite being a general pain-in-the-ass, there were few better partners on a mission. He had saved Chuck's life more times than Chuck cared to count.

Still, at the moment Casey was managing to be a larger pain-in-the ass than usual, because his words were difficult to dismiss out of hand.

One thing Chuck had never been able to reconcile was that he had slept with Carina one night, and Sarah had showed up at his door and kissed him the following night. Casey was right. The timing of it all was more than a little strange. Ever since Sarah returned from her mission abroad, for the first time, things between him and Sarah seemed to be progressing like any garden-variety relationship with one of the CIA's best should.

What Casey was suggesting would certainly help explain why Sarah had changed her mind about the whole thing. It would explain how the beautiful CIA agent ended up with the Buy More nerd. The very thought hurt. Maybe he really was just an assignment, and Sarah Walker was simply extraordinarily good at her job.

Chuck's brow furrowed as he stepped up onto a sidewalk. Could she really have been playing him all this time? Everything she had done seemed so sincere. Just the echoes of the lunchtime kiss were enough to make him feel like he was floating through the air again.

No, he decided. Sarah couldn't be faking what she had shown lately. There was no faking that kind of kiss, or countless other moments since her return.

By the time he reached the spy shop, he had shaken off his doubts. He may not understand the intelligence world, but he understood what his heart was telling him, and his heart told him he could trust Sarah. Casey was just playing some kind of game by preying on Chuck's insecurities. That had to be it.

Feeling better, he started whistling as he opened the door to the spy shop, cheekily labeled "Spy Hard" in large painted letters across the front window. Inside was a narrow but long store, with row upon row of floor-to-ceiling shelving containing new and used equipment of varying usefulness to security experts and would-be spies alike. Cheap fluorescent lights provided inadequate lighting, which would have lent the store the authentic feel of a covert back room if not for the incessant buzzing and occasional flickering in some of the antiquated units.

The front counter was vacant. In fact, there was no sign of anyone in the store. "Jay?" Chuck called.

For a moment, nobody answered. Then, "Chuck? That you?"

"Yep."

"I'm in the back."

He placed Jay's slightly hoarse voice as coming from the back right corner of the store, so Chuck navigated the aisle along the right wall. Along the way, he idly stopped to examine a strange cylinder that caught his eye. It turned out to be a cheap spy scope. He had recently used a scope at least twenty times as powerful – and one quarter the size.

He set the scope back on the shelf and kept heading back, idly humming a tune as he went. Up ahead, Jay was hunched over a small workbench in a dim corner, working intently. He was examining the watch using a small screwdriver and an even smaller probe. "Find the problem?" Chuck asked.

The man's lean face turned to look up at Chuck, his skin even whiter than normal. "I found a problem," he said in a strained voice.

Chuck let out a small laugh. "What's the matter, man?"

The wheels of the rolling desk chair rattled as Jay stood up. He awkwardly backed away, a wary expression on his face. "See for yourself."

His friend was acting very strangely. It was almost as if the man were afraid to turn his back. Chuck gave Jay a puzzled grin and walked to the desk.

The watch sat face-down on the work bench with the back cover removed. A lamp mounted a long spring-hinged arm cast spotlighted the watch under an unusually bright light. Chuck didn't notice anything unusual, just the usual workings of a watch. He shrugged. "What?"

"Look along the far side of the case."

Checking where Jay indicated, Chuck spotted a tiny, flat black plastic chip clinging to the inside of the watch. A light intermittently flashed an incensed red, like a sinister eye flapping open and then snapping shut just as quickly. Thin black wires coiled from the chip to a mount sporting a battery that, on closer examination, seemed out-of-place in the cheap watch.

A device of some kind was inside Chuck's watch. The watch that Sarah gave him. The watch that Sarah had promised him contained no spy equipment of any kind.

A knot formed in the pit of Chuck's stomach.

Jay's eyed Chuck as if watching a coiled viper. "Chuck? What the hell is that thing?" he demanded with a mixture of fear and awe.

Chuck slowly bent over to examine the device more closely. Tilting the watch to the side between his thumb and forefinger, he managed to read 'AXG223g' where it was etched into the casing in block white letters.

The model number caused Chuck's eyelids to flutter and grow heavy.

_A black crow sitting on the branch of a tree._

_A spec sheet on the device._

_A directive indicating that these devices should only be used in the highest priority missions._

_An attachment memo discussing use of the "g" series of the device._

_A video of a man collapsing to the ground in the middle of a crowded park._

_The crow in the tree._

Chuck's mouth went dry. Suddenly numb fingers carefully lowered the watch back to the table and then lifted away to hang limply at his side.

The black chip housed a high-powered, self-contained GPS tracking device. However, the truly frightening part was that, when mounted on a conductive surface such as a metallic watch band, this particular version was capable of delivering a single electric charge capable of sending a person into ventricular fibrillation.

In other words, the person would die of a heart attack.

Chuck's phone rang. Unconsciously pulling the phone out of his pants pocket, he glanced down at the display and saw Sarah's face smiling back at him.

"Don't freak out," Chuck whispered under his breath.


	3. Morpheus

**Monday, February 18th, 8:11 PM PST**

Sarah stalked across her apartment, brow crinkled with worry and shoulders set high. Her interlaced fingers flexed as she tried to shed some of her tension.

She wondered why she hadn't just told Chuck the truth in the first place.

A series of messages – some voice, some text – had been designed to get him over to her place. Chuck hadn't responded to any of them, which was unusual. Maybe it was just her insecurities talking, but she felt like Chuck was avoiding her.

At first, she resisted using the surveillance equipment. The very idea made her feel like an obsessive schoolgirl stalking a crush. Still, the metal suitcase housing the equipment beckoned alluringly from beneath the side of her bed. It promised an undetectable way to secure answers to some of her questions.

For a while, she managed to ignore the suitcase by doing laps around her apartment, door to window and back again. However, after her umpteenth circuit, she finally said, "You're being silly." Saying the words out loud didn't make her feel any better, but no matter how much she wanted to respect Chuck's privacy, Chuck was still an asset. Casey was off on some other mission, so it was her watch. The job still came first.

She stopped pacing long enough to stare at the city lights through her window and sigh. With Casey away, this would have been a perfect evening for her and Chuck to be alone.

After a lap or two more to convince herself that using the equipment was purely a matter of duty, she pulled out the suitcase and set it on the bed. She popped it open and punched a few buttons. Flickering LEDs and gentle electric hums verified that the unit was coming online.

As the system initialized, Sarah gently pressed her lips together, a habit she had purposely ingrained to replace her nervous tell of biting her lower lip. She felt strangely vulnerable. More and more she found herself opening up to Chuck, and as good as that made her feel, each time further blurred the lines between woman and agent – and threatened both.

Yesterday, she had almost lost him. Chuck had been kidnapped, escaping only by driving his car into a ravine when he recognized that he was the only one in the car wearing a seat belt. He had done it to protect her, had said as much to her on the phone. However, the Intersect was far more important than she was. He shouldn't have risked his life for her, and probably wouldn't have done it but for his feelings for her.

Seeing the crumpled car lying on its roof, tires spinning in the air, had practically ripped her heart out of her chest. Her emotions had compromised her judgment. Instead of confirming that the kidnappers had been neutralized, she had chosen to check on Chuck first. No harm had been done this time. But what about the next? What about the way she had kissed him at lunch, leaving them vulnerable to Fulcrum and Casey's sensibilities? What about the little things, such as the way she had hesitated to verify his whereabouts while on watch?

He was willing to give up his life for hers. She was starting to make mistakes.

It was getting dangerous.

The professional thing to do would be to recuse herself from the assignment, but with Fulcrum agents seemingly around every corner, putting somebody new on protection detail carried its own risks. The replacement might be Fulcrum. If not, Fulcrum could catch wind of where the Intersect was during the change-out. Even if Fulcrum didn't find Chuck, the new agent might threaten the team dynamic or just plain not be as good as Sarah.

No, overall it was tactically sound for Sarah to stay put, so she vowed that the job would always come first. It had to. Far more was riding on this assignment than her feelings for Chuck. The day might come when duty would compel her to leave or escort him to an underground bunker, or worse, so very much worse. But if it came to something worse than her leaving, best it be her so she could ensure there was no other alternative.

Until the day came when orders ended things, she was not going to pass up any moment that they could safely share together. That's why Chuck's absence hurt so much. Tonight was as safe as a night could be, but it was feeling more and more like a missed opportunity, and opportunities were scarce.

The system finished its boot sequence. As she punched buttons and adjusted dials, she cursed herself for not just telling Chuck the truth. Today was her birthday, and she wanted to share it with him. She had left him a hint, but apparently he missed it.

The CIA had recently installed a hidden vault in his room. She had programmed the security code to match her birth date, 02-18-82, and made sure Chuck knew the code. After their lunch and their kiss, she had spent the afternoon in eager anticipation. If by some chance he had missed the clue, she was going to tell him when he came over. More than anything, she had hoped to see Chuck's face light up when he realized she had shared something real with him. Sharing something real was her gift to both of them.

Except he wasn't coming over. The surveillance equipment told her that Chuck was home, safe in the apartment. Unfortunately, the equipment couldn't tell her why he wouldn't pick up the damn phone when she called.

Her plan had failed, and really, it was probably her own fault. Everything about her didn't need to be a riddle to be solved or a secret to be discovered. Leaving things to chance and keeping secrets hidden had their consequences.

Some instinct nagged at her, warning her that something was wrong, but she refused to get paranoid just because she had taken things further with Chuck. She refused to get paranoid because the likes of Bryce Larkin had up and left her in the past without saying a word. Chuck was different. He wouldn't do that to her. He wouldn't.

She sighed a bitter sigh as she slammed the lid down on the suitcase. So much for surprises.

* * *

_**Tuesday, February 19th, 5:36 am**_

Chuck wasn't exactly surprised to see the window to his bedroom slide open. As soon as the intruder's foot hit the floor, he flipped on the nightstand light.

Casey froze like a teenager caught sneaking into the house after curfew, one leg still hanging over the window sill. "You're up early," he commented dryly.

Chuck sat perched on top of his pillow, leaning against the headboard. The arm that had reached out to turn on the lamp returned to join the one stretched slackly over his bent knees. A comic book that had long since failed to hold his interest sat discarded on top of the bedspread.

With everything that was going on, he hadn't slept, so he had decided to put on his Buy More gear and wait in case Casey reprised the early wake-up call from the past weekend. Chuck was a little spooked that Casey did. Clearly he was up to something. But what?

Still, for the moment Chuck held the upper hand. Echoing Casey's words from the previous stunt, Chuck said, "Gotta start shifting my schedule around. Be a little less predictable. Right?"

Casey examined Chuck's eyes as he finished climbing into the room. "Right," Casey said.

His voice lacked its usual certainty, Chuck noted with a certain satisfaction. _Good. If Casey is so determined to keep me off-balance, let's see how he likes it for a change. _He returned the comic book in its place in his nightstand drawer and climbed off his bed to grab his keys and wallet off his nightstand. "Well, this does seem a little extreme, but I guess you're right. After all, nobody in their right mind would expect me to leave for my 8:30 shift at 5:30."

"Look on the bright side, Bartowski. The early bird gets the worm."

Refusing to look at Casey, Chuck answered, "Yeah, but how did that work out for the worm?"

_**

* * *

Tuesday, February 19th, 9:58 am**_

Outside of the holiday season, Tuesday mornings were dead at the Buy More. Today was no exception, and almost eerily so. The store resonated with TV voices that, at least to Chuck's ears, played just a little too loudly, carrying a slightly tinny timbre from reflecting off too many merchandise shelves and too few bodies. It was off-putting, the big box store equivalent of turning into a dark alley and realizing that you were surrounded by little more than towering walls and the sound of your own footsteps.

With the store devoid of customers, only a skeleton staff of green shirts was on site, mostly busy messing with inventory somewhere in the back of the store. Big Mike was holed up in his office, either contentedly sucking down mall food or looking for half a reason to bury a loafer in some poor employee's backside. The Nerd Herd was overstaffed, under-worked, and nowhere to be seen.

Chuck glanced around, knowing full well why the Herders were MIA. When the job queue at one Buy More emptied out, other stores could go into the system and mark jobs to be passed along. Inevitably, they used the opportunity to rid themselves of the customers they didn't want, the ones that really should require warning labels on the job orders: too ignorant, too belligerent, or too far away.

Sure enough, ten o'clock rolled around and the queue on the screen went from empty to three jobs as the corporate Nerd Herd system automatically load-balanced. Out of habit, he gave the list a quick once-over. He could almost see the flags next to each job. Ethel Marks no doubt received a computer from a well-meaning niece or nephew and now couldn't figure out how to download photos or check her email. Too ignorant. Garrison Duckett, a six-time repeat offender, had bought a computer with a service plan and clearly believed that meant Buy More would service every computer at his real estate office. Too belligerent. The last job might very well be halfway to Las Vegas. Too far away.

He printed the order sheets out with a smile devoid of humor. Normally he would just let the more ridiculous jobs expire, but he was in a bad enough mood that he might farm one out if any of the Herders got on his nerves.

He immediately felt guilty. For once, the Herders weren't the reason for his bad mood. Then again, the day was young.

The whine of the printer dissipated into a dissatisfied hum, allowing Chuck's ears to pick up the torturing of khaki fabric punctuated with heavy footfalls. Big Mike waddled towards Chuck, carrying a Globex delivery box and a big chip on his shoulder. Clearly Big Mike hadn't been eating mall food in his office.

"Bartowski!" he bellowed. "What have I told you about personal deliveries at the Buy More?!"

Chuck stared down at the angry man. "Um, nothing, Big Mike. I've never gotten one before."

The response seemed to defang Big Mike. The man gamely tried to conjure a reply that would justify the initial outburst, but his irritation only grew when he couldn't find one. The silence dragged out a bit too long, leaving Big Mike no place to vent his frustrations.

Lacking any verbal weapons, he settled for a physical one. He shoved the edge of the box into Chuck's gut and barked, "No personal deliveries at the Buy More!"

Chuck gasped at the unexpected impact and hunched over slightly. He instinctively clutched at the package. "Got it," he said weakly. With one last glare, Big Mike headed back for his office.

Shaking off the big man's blustering, Chuck stared curiously at the box as he carried it behind the Nerd Herd counter. He hadn't ordered anything, so he had no idea what it might be. Maybe a beta version of some software?

The package was probably benign, but the previous day's discovery had Chuck on edge. He was taking nothing for granted. A slight shake of the box told him little, other than the contents were packed to avoid movement. A brief examination of the exterior revealed nothing out of the ordinary.

Taking no chances, he used a pair of scissors to poke a small hole in the packaging. A tilt of the package allowed light to shine into the hole. Inside was a pair of large sealed manila envelopes and nothing else. As satisfied as possible that the package was safe, Chuck finished opening it and removed the top envelope. A quick tear of the paper revealed an expensive-looking cell phone padded in a bubble-wrap pouch. Despite the vast array of cell phones that Buy More carried, he didn't recognize the model or the make.

Curious, he removed the pouch to examine the phone more carefully. It felt surprisingly heavy for its size. He flipped the phone over in his hand and caught a glimpse of the back casing, serial numbers and all.

He flashed.

_A sunrise, with prismatic colors highlighting the undersides of the high clouds._

_Specifications of the phone._

_An exploded view of the phone construction._

_Technical engineering diagrams. _

_The multihued sunrise._

It was a nondescript, difficult-to-trace satellite cell phone issued to government agents. But who would have sent it to him … and why?

The phone rang.

Chuck let out a small cry and dropped the phone. It struck the linoleum floor hard, clattering to rest face-up. Horrified, Chuck blurted, "Oh, God, tell me I didn't break it."

The phone rang again.

Letting out a sigh of relief, Chuck crouched down to one knee. He stayed low and glanced around to verify that nobody could see him behind the desk. Satisfied he was safely behind cover, he flipped the phone open and put it to his ear. "If you say, 'Hello, Neo,' I am totally going to lose it."

An electronically distorted voice said, "They know who you are."

"What is it with you guys and pronouns? Who the hell are 'they'?"

"Fulcrum."

The blood ran from his face. He turned around and sat down on the floor, leaning back against a gray filing cabinet. "What?! How?"

"Not important. Fulcrum agents are en route to acquire you as we speak."

"Do you know what they're after?"

"You mean, besides the entire database of government intelligence?"

"Well, yeah, but-"

"They want the Intersect, Chuck."

"I'll tell Sar- ; I'll tell my handlers. They'll know what to do."

"You can't trust your handlers," the electronically masked voice said. "You can't trust anyone."

Chuck's eyes narrowed. "Fantastic. Apparently I'm not supposed to trust the people who have protected me for six months, but I am supposed to trust a random person who sends me a cell phone, somehow knows when I have it in my hand, and disguises his voice. Gotta say that's a bit of a tough sell."

"A new version of the Intersect comes online today."

"What?!"

"A new version of the Interse-"

"I heard you." He fervently wished he hadn't.

"How do you think the government will view you once the new Intersect is operational?"

He thought about that for a moment. The data in his head was six months old. It didn't take a mind-reader to know what Graham and Beckman thought of him. Chuck wanted to believe that all of the missions, the sacrifices, the risks to his life mattered to them, but he had seen firsthand that it didn't. "They'll see me as a liability," he finally admitted.

"And what does the government do to a liability?"

"Eliminate it." He fought the urge to crawl back into one of Jeff's favorite hiding spots beneath the desk and go fetal until the store closed, settling instead for a quick peek around the store to make sure he was still safe. "What am I supposed to do?"

"If Fulcrum isn't a threat, you won't be seen as a threat. Figure out who the leaders of Fulcrum are."

"Oh, is that all. Because it's not like dozens of other agents have tried to do that."

"You're the only one who can figure it out. You can upload the latest version of the Intersect."

"Wait, so you're suggesting, what, exactly - that I somehow break into a government facility, upload intel from one of their most closely guarded secret projects, and try to make it out alive? I saw what happened to the last guy who tried that, and he was one the agency's best. That's suicide!"

"Suicide would be staying where you are or trusting your handlers."

Chuck shut his eyes. His emotions were taking over, and that certainly wasn't helping. He drew a deep breath through his nose and let it out slowly, and then forced himself to consider about everything again.

Fulcrum was coming. The new Intersect was coming online. He could be seen as expendable. This was no time to hide – or be caught with his eyes closed.

His eyes popped open. He needed to act, and do that, he needed some more answers. This might be his only chance to get them.

He hoped his mysterious friend was feeling chatty.

He asked, "Why would uploading the latest version of the Intersect help?"

"The government was very thorough in its efforts to enter about every piece of information it could get its hands on into the system. However, significant sets of records that were uploaded the first time mysteriously went missing before the second load."

"Fulcrum records?"

Even through the electronic distortion, Chuck could sense the impatience in the voice. "Yes, Chuck, but in the latest upload, a variety of additional information was added. Linking the two versions of the Intersect could allow you to string together the clues and figure out who heads Fulcrum. Since you are the only remaining copy of the first version of the Intersect-"

"I get it. I'm the only one who can do this. But, for the sake of argument, let's say I somehow pull off this miracle and that it somehow helps to bring down Fulcrum. Then I'd have both Intersects in my head. I'd be seen as even more of a risk."

"With Fulcrum around, no place is safe for you - not a safe house, not a bunker, not anywhere. Without Fulcrum around, there are places where you could be safely hidden."

Chuck saw a ray of hope. He was in trouble no matter what, but this might give him a chance. "Where is the Intersect?"

"You have the details in your head. Flash on 'Operation Sand Wall'."

"I already did."

"Then you've got the interior plans for the building in your head. As for the location, flash on 'Operation Grindstone'."

Chuck's eyes narrowed.

_An image of a crowded street amidst skyscrapers, dozens of taxis interspersed with other cars._

_A series of maps of the NSA campus._

_Details behind the information feeding into the Intersect._

_The image of the busy street._

"Maryland," Chuck gasped through the aftermath of the flash. "The Intersect facility is in Maryland. Who is this?"

"Focus. Get away from Fulcrum - and your handlers."

-click-

Chuck pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it. While everything the strange voice had told him made sense, he wasn't stupid enough to blindly trust a stranger.

Unfortunately, he didn't have reason to trust his handlers either. Casey was working overtime to try to drive a wedge between Chuck and Sarah, claiming that she was up to something. On top of that, Chuck had already caught the NSA agent carefully watching him several times that morning, and the early morning wake-up calls had to be more than just an annoyance.

As for Sarah, he wanted to trust her. His gut told him to trust her. However, she had told him there was no spy gear in the watch that she had given him, but after finding the tracking – and assassination – device in his watch, it had become pretty obvious that she wasn't sharing everything, either. The one thing she had been honest about, he thought, was that she wanted the time the two of them could have together.

What if that time was up?

He glanced down at the watch. The band felt cold against his skin. He had forced himself to put it on that morning, knowing full well that Casey or Sarah might get suspicious if he suddenly stopped wearing it.

He desperately wanted to call Sarah, to hear her reassure him that everything was going to be all right. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible. Sarah had to take orders, too.

It was all too much. He needed to think. Chuck decided to head for the cage area to find some privacy.

Chuck slipped the strange phone into his pants pocket. Trying to avoid acting suspiciously, he stood up slowly, forcing himself to look at the out-of-date Nerd Herd call sheet to give himself a moment to calm down. He subtly glanced around. A few customers had finally trickled into the store. One was talking to Casey, but Casey was still paying more attention to Chuck than to the customer. Hopefully the customer would distract the NSA agent at least a little bit.

He started to head for the back, then froze. He had almost forgotten about the rest of the package. All things considered, Chuck would have preferred to dispose of the packaging somewhere where anyone else would have trouble finding it, but after Big Mike's outburst, he didn't want to call too much attention to it by lugging it away with him. He settled for shoving the box and the first envelope in the back of one of the wide filing cabinet drawers and locking it. He picked up the second envelope, covered it with the Nerd Herd order sheets he had just printed, and tried to make a quick exit.

As he left the counter, he felt Casey's eyes follow him. Chuck tried his best to appear nonchalant. He even smiled at Big Mike, who stopped chewing out a young saleswoman long enough to shoot an annoyed glance in return.

"Hey, buddy," Morgan said, appearing out of nowhere.

Chuck jumped, letting out an involuntary "Ahh!"

Morgan, clad in his typical green shirt and khaki uniform, said, "Easy there, killer. Just wondering if we're still on for tonight."

"Tonight. Tonight," Chuck stalled, trying to make his mind work. He finally remembered. "Right! Tonight! 'Godfather night'. Cheap pasta and red wine, followed by _The Godfather_ and _The Godfather, Part II_."

"Right. Not Part III, unless we are -really- hammered."

Jeff, lounging-slash-hiding near the printer accessories, bolted to his feet, sticking his head over the metal shelving unit. "Did somebody say 'really hammered'?" He walked around to join the conversation.

Chuck grimaced. This was not how a quick exit was supposed to work.

Morgan said, "Yeah, we're drinking wine and watching the Godfather movies."

"Dude, I love the Godfather. 'Say hello to my little friend!'" He improvised shooting a submachine gun at a green shirt carrying a stack of boxes. The teenager gave him a disturbed look and quickly moved along.

Chuck nervously glanced around. The thought of submachine guns wasn't helping him calm down, but at least the impromptu powwow seemed to have reassured Casey, who finally started paying more attention to his customer. Chuck idly corrected Jeff as he watched Casey. "_Scarface_."

"What's that?" Morgan asked.

Chuck turned back to his two co-workers. "'Say hello to my little friend.' It's a line from _Scarface_."

Morgan slapped Chuck on the shoulder. "Man, for a moment I thought you were talking about the guy who just walked into the store. I wouldn't be calling him names."

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Chuck slowly turned to look to the front of the store. Just inside the main entrance stood a tall Latino man, his dark hair combed back and a scar circling his left eye like an angry child's scrawl. Tommy Delgado, Fulcrum operative and one of the only people to know that Chuck was the Intersect, casually scanned the store, his hands carelessly shoved deep into his suit pants pockets.

Chuck's chest tightened. Score one for the voice on the phone.

He forced himself to turn back very slowly to face his friends again. Morgan said, "Wonder how he got that thing; it looks vicious."

Jeff said, "I'm sure the chicks totally dig it. He probably gets all kind of play with that thing."

"Ladies love a bad boy."

Chuck shook his head. "Not that bad, Morgan. Not that bad." He ignored the curious looks from his friends.

Fulcrum's presence complicated matters. He could no longer just slip away. If he just left, Fulcrum might decide to interrogate his friends, and he couldn't take that chance. He made a quick decision. "Jeff, can you grab Anna and Lester and meet us out back?"

"Time for another game of jiggly ball?"

"Something like that. Meet us at the loading dock in five minutes."

"OK." Jeff headed towards the back to find the other Herders.

Chuck guided Morgan towards the back of the store by putting an arm around his friend's shoulder, earning a curious look. "Morgan, I could really use your help."

"Sure, man, anything. You know that."

Chuck hoped that was the case. He was about to ask his friend for some unusual favors.

And that might be the only way he and his friends could get out of this alive.

* * *

_I want to send out more thanks to the people who helped beta-read the first three chapters for me, Baylink and MySoapBox. I can't say enough good things about the advice they provide. All mistakes are my own._


	4. Distracted

Casey mostly ignored his customer, a neatly-coiffed yuppie contentedly prattling about HDTV standards. Casey had more pressing concerns than darkness levels or the benefits of interlacing versus progressive scan. Besides, he felt fairly confident this guy could blow two grand without his help.

Instead he tuned out the noise and kept one eye firmly on Bartowski. The man had been acting strangely all morning, and his body language when he popped up from behind the Nerd Herd desk spoke of a man looking to run. Casey was slightly reassured when Bartowski stopped to talk to Grimes and Barnes, and even more comforted when Bartowski started walking towards the back of the store with his arm around Grimes and made a call on his cell phone.

That feeling faded when his phone chirped with an unusual set of three beeps, two of a lower pitch and one of a higher. That ring meant Chuck's call was designed to sound the alarm. But the alarm for what?

"Excuse me," Casey said politely to the customer. "I have to take this." Not caring in the least about the chagrin on the man's face, Casey walked into Home Appliances as he answered. "Yeah?"

"We're out of toner cartridges. Do me a favor and look up front. I'm going to look in the cage."

The predetermined code phrase gave Casey all he needed. Carefully, he turned and checked the front of the store. He had little trouble spotting Delgado near the main entrance, scouting the lay of the land. "Roger that," he said before hanging up. He cursed at himself. He had been so distracted watching Bartowski that he missed a well-known Fulcrum operative walking through the front door. At least that explained why Bartowski was acting so strangely. Fulcrum agents tended to have that effect on people.

Casey side-stepped into a row of metallic-finished refrigerators as he dialed another number, allowing him to watch Delgado from behind a bit of cover. Walker quickly answered. "Code blue," he said immediately. "Hostiles in the Buy More. Tommy Delgado under surveillance."

"Any others?"

"Unknown."

"Acknowledged," Walker said.

Casey flipped his phone closed and shoved it deep into a pocket. With back-up on the way, he took a moment to assess the situation.

If Delgado was back, Fulcrum had to know Bartowski was the Intersect. Still, Delgado's appearance at the front of the store was strange. Why had he made himself so obvious? It was almost as if he wanted to be seen.

That made it unlikely that he was alone.

A flicker of movement reflected in the refrigerator finish caught the corner of his eye. He whirled just in time to parry a gleaming knife aimed at the side of his throat. Apparently, the yuppie was at the Buy More for more than just the big screens at bargain prices. The man drew back into an attack position, his sneer as sharp as the edge of his blade.

The sneak attack irritated Casey. He hadn't survived numerous military campaigns and undercover missions to die at the hands of a guy wearing a pink sweater vest.

* * *

Sarah hung up her phone and glanced around the Weinerlicious. Luckily, it was early enough that the restaurant was still closed, and Scooter wasn't due in for another hour.

She typed in some numbers on the cash register keypad. A camera descended from the ceiling and a monitor rose out of the counter. She quickly had Director Graham on the display.

"Agent Walker," he said in his gravelly voice. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Hostiles in the Buy More," Sarah replied as she punched a few more buttons on the cash register. A panel by her feet slid to the side, exposing a set of weapons in customized molds. She pulled out her favorite Sig Sauer and checked the ammunition. "Tommy Delgado confirmed; others possible."

"What?!" Graham hissed. "How did this happen?!"

"Unknown, sir. Orders?"

Graham pursed his lips, obviously weighing something in his mind.

"Sir?" Sarah prodded. It wasn't like Graham to hesitate, and now wasn't a good time for him to start.

Her boss leaned forward. "Same as always, Agent Walker. Protect the Intersect."

Something about the way Graham spoke felt off. "Sir, if there is something I should know-"

"You have your orders. Protect the Intersect. At any cost." Director Graham signed off.

Fulcrum was in the Buy More. Graham had reacted suspiciously to the news. As bad as things were, something else was going on.

Things had gotten dangerously complicated in a hurry.

Sarah punched the 'Hide All' command code into the cash register. The drawer and the rest of her equipment vanished. She worked her way down her very short checklist of things to finish before leaving: sticking the Sig Sauer into the waistband of her uniform and turning off the oil in the deep fry pits.

She lifted the hinged section of the counter and moved purposefully for the front door. Still puzzled by Graham's reaction to her news, she unconsciously looked back at where the monitor had been, frowning as she tried to figure out what it meant.

The bell on the door tinkled wildly. Her head whipped back around in time to see the sole of a shoe heading for her nose.

Only instincts honed by years of training saved her. She snapped her right hand up and batted at the ankle while arching her back to move her head out of range. The heel of her hand found the ankle of her attacker, pushing the path of the blow far enough that it missed its mark.

The desperation of her move threw her off-balance and in no position to defend against a follow-up strike. Rather than try to defend or withdraw, Sarah rotated with the force of the parry, dropping to her left knee as she finished spinning around. Her left hand found the pistol in the small of her back and yanked it from the elastic waistband.

The maneuver left her gun in her off hand and on the same side as the attacker's foot, but forced her assailant to kick at the gun rather than her exposed head or ribs. The ball of the foot made contact with her wrist, sending a stinging numbness up her arm and triggering a shot that flew harmlessly into the back wall before the gun clattered across the floor. Expecting the move, she used the force of the blow to her arm to add a little speed to her torso rotation as she fired a viciously right-handed punch into her opponent's exposed inner thigh. A familiar feminine cry filled the air as she felt her opponent's balance give.

Her punch, though no doubt painful, again left her overextended. She allowed her body to keep moving with the force of the punch and tucked her shoulder towards the floor. She felt a blow catch the edge of her puffy shirt as she rolled across the floor. Popping to her feet, she neatly spun, ready to defend against the next attack.

To her surprise, no attack came. Her assailant stood perfectly composed by the restaurant door, in no apparent hurry to continue the confrontation.

Sarah's eyes narrowed. "Lizzie?!"

Lizzie Shafai smiled. Almond-shaped eyes glistened with the comfort of one who knew she had the upper hand. "Hello, Agent Walker. So nice to see you again."

"Wish I could say the same. Come back for a rubber match?"

"Rubber match?" Lizzie thought about that, and then laughed. "Oh, no, you think you won our second fight because you fell off a building a little more gracefully? That was dumb luck."

"Last time I checked it was you lying unconscious in a pile of garbage. Seemed appropriate."

"You should talk." Lizzie eyed Sarah's Weinerlicious uniform with a catty little smirk.

Sarah wasn't the least bit self-conscious of her uniform. The job, not the uniform, was what mattered. "Ready for a rematch?"

"Well, I could just shoot you." An impossibly quick move later, a small gun was in her hand, illustrating her point. "Lock you in the freezer again."

Sarah eyed the path to get to Lizzie, and more importantly, Lizzie's gun. There was no easy route through the maze of yellow-circled tabletops. Patiently, Sarah waited.

The other woman shrugged and let the aim of the gun wander off to one side. "But, I guess we have time for a quick rematch."

"Have time?"

"We don't really care about you, Agent Walker. We're here for Chuck Bartowski. You know, the Intersect? As we speak, he's being flushed out the back of the Buy More, and given what we know about him, something tells me the two men we have waiting for him will be able to take him down."

* * *

Casey threw a pair of quick punches at his opponent, which the other man easily dodged by ducking closer to the bank of refrigerators. His attacker telegraphed a counter with the knife; Casey blocked it by throwing open a refrigerator door. The tip of the knife screeched across the stainless steel like an eight-penny nail on a chalk board, the angle guiding the attacker's knife hand out wide.

With the refrigerator door between Casey and the knife, the attacker knew he was in trouble. He clearly thought the next strike would be at his head, because his off hand went up to protect his face. Instead, Casey kicked hard at the side of the man's knee, and was rewarded with a sickening crunch. The knife hit the floor as the collapsing man's hands went for his injured knee. Now the attacks went for the face. A quick punch and a slam of the head against the refrigerator knocked the man out.

Casey stood up and closed the refrigerator door. He winced when he saw the gash in the finish and made a mental note to get the damage repaired before Big Mike noticed.

A sharp pain rippled out from the right side of his rib cage. Instinctively, Casey spun away from the contact and was able to dodge two follow-up strikes. The full effect of the pain washed over him as he twisted back into a defensive posture.

A female 'customer' had sucker-punched him in the side, a solid, painful hit. Her turquoise workout pants and the practical pony tail for her straight brown hair had her looking for all the world like a soccer mom fresh from the gym.

"Cheap shot," Casey growled, trying to suck in air without giving away how much his side hurt.

The woman smirked, circling slowly towards Casey's injured side. "I figured you wouldn't mind if I started things off. You know, 'ladies first'."

"Hmph. And here I thought women wanted to be treated as equals."

She gave a mock sigh. "Chivalry truly is dead."

"And soon enough, you will be too."

"Tsk tsk. Not a nice thing for an NSA agent to say."

Casey realized she was trying to get him to talk and move to assess the damage she had done. He stopped making any effort to hide the pain in his quickly stiffening side or his struggle to breathe normally, and even played it up slightly.

The corner of her mouth turned up. She took a quick step to his right and used one of his favorite ploys, a feint towards the injury and then a strike somewhere else. Having used the same strategy so many times, he was ready for it and easily blocked the shot to the face, but pretended like he hurt too much to counter.

He stole a quick glance around, ensuring that no other sneak attacks were imminent. Caught back in the enclosure by the refrigerators, his vision of the rest of the store was largely blocked. He had to find a way to end this quickly. Delgado or other Fulcrum operatives would have Bartowski in custody all too soon.

She feinted a feint, this time following through on her strike to his side. He winced but forced himself to absorb the blow. The move was weakened by the initial fake; it was far more important to block the follow-up flurry of blows from her right hand and left leg. This time, he pretended to try to counter but pulled the punch as if his rib was broken.

"Aw," Miss-blue-pants said as her feet bounced between various attacking positions. "Want me to kiss it and make it all better?"

There are two problems with dancing around too much during a fight. The feet can fall into a rhythm, leading to moves that are all too predictable. More importantly, feet can spend a little too much time in the air. Feet that aren't planted on the ground can't help dodge a punch.

Gauging her moves, Casey took a quick step forward, closed the gap and launched a ferocious roundhouse punch. The woman's eyes widened as she tried to stop her sideways momentum, only to realize that she had no way to do so. He hit her square in the mouth and sent her skidding back across the floor, where she banged into the base of a plain white gas range.

He looked at a smear of lipstick on his knuckles. "Thanks," he said smugly. "I feel better already."

Two down. Now to find Delgado.

It turned out he didn't need to look. A strong forearm wrapped around his neck. Casey tried to jerk free, but the hold had him momentarily immobile.

"Drew Jennings sends his regards," Delgado's voice whispered into his ear.

A syringe bit into the base of Casey's neck, quickly followed by the burning sensation of whatever Fulcrum nastiness was being injected into his veins.

"We'll be in touch," were the last words he heard before darkness took him.

* * *

Sarah gritted her teeth. "If you hurt Chuck…"

Lizzie's ditzy laugh grated. "Why, Sarah. Don't tell me that ring was for you after all." She paused thoughtfully. "Or do you just wish that it was?"

The question nettled more than it should have. Sarah felt her mouth hang open stupidly.

Another annoying laugh jarred her back to reality. Lizzie set the gun on the table to one side and readjusted her fashionable black-and-gray sweatsuit. "One more round. We'll even call it the rubber match. Just know that even if you win, you still lose. By the time our fight is over, Chuck Bartowski will be long gone, and you will never, ever see him again."

The hallmark of Sarah Walker's career was her ability to remain calm under the most extreme of circumstances. However, Lizzie's barbs, like lashes from a whip, cut deeply into Sarah, infuriating her, until all she saw through her white haze of her anger was the mocking figure of Lizzie Shafai between her and the door. Between her and Chuck.

With a battle cry unlike any she had ever uttered, Sarah took off running, taking three steps before launching herself high into the air off one of the chairs.

Lizzie dodged the flying kick easily enough, the cocky grin on her face communicating how easily she expected to win the fight against an enraged Sarah. The grin quickly faded. Sarah fought no less efficiently than she usually did. In fact, she was faster, more vicious, grunting and crying out with every strike. She was more focused, not less.

Punch. Jump kick. Combination punch. Roundhouse kick. Punch. All were blocked, but Lizzie was back on her heels, purely on the defensive. She tried to put tables and chairs between them, but Sarah turned those objects into missiles, sliding them across the floor or flipping them through the air.

All Lizzie could do was parry and hope Sarah made a mistake. That hope was far-fetched. Inevitably Sarah slipped a punch through, tagging Lizzie on the jaw and knocking her back a step. She recovered, but after she blocked several successive strikes, a strong right foot broke through to compress her stomach. She caught Sarah's ankle and tried to spin her around, but Sarah simply whirled in her grasp to deliver a flying kick to the side of Lizzie's face. Lizzie went tumbling into one of the cheap yellow tabletops. The table collapsed under her weight with a terrific clatter. Sarah landed gracefully on her feet.

The panic in Lizzie's body language was obvious. Breathing heavily, the woman's desperate eyes darted around the room as she tried to right herself, looking for something, anything that would help to stem the tide.

Sarah's hair flew wildly, but her eyes were focused and her breathing had a steady rhythm. She stalked towards her foe, already beaten but too stubborn to realize it.

As Sarah closed, Lizzie reverted to amateur form. With a desperate cry, she tossed the heavy center leg from the collapsed table and tried to scamper back towards the door to retrieve her gun.

It was almost too easy. Sarah dodged the missile and cut off Lizzie with a single sideways move. Lizzie launched a clumsy punch, which Sarah parried with the inside of her opposite arm. A quick turn of the arm pinned Lizzie's arm to Sarah's side. She turned her back, keeping the arm pinned, and launched a pair of vicious elbows to Lizzie's face, rocking her back onto her heels. Sarah reached down and put the captured hand into a judo hold, giving the attached body the choice of a broken wrist or a full flip onto her back. The body chose the latter.

Sarah stared down at the woman. Glazed eyes stared emptily back at Sarah as she readjusted her hold on the off-chance the woman had anything left. She didn't.

"You will not hurt Chuck Bartowski," Sarah spat.

A heel to the face stole what was left of Lizzie's consciousness.

Sarah took no time to enjoy her victory. After one last check to ensure her opponent was down for good, she retrieved the two guns and took off out the door, knowing that she was already too late.

* * *

Casey slowly woke up. His body fought him every step of the way. Only through sheer obstinance was he able to slowly force himself to sit up, grimacing with the effort.

He was sitting on the floor near the bank of refrigerators. The skirt and the prep were gone. Delgado was gone. The only signs that he hadn't dreamed the whole thing were the marred surface of the refrigerator and a painful stinging at the base of his neck. He gingerly reached back and touched the painful wound. He felt like a giant mosquito had stuck its proboscis through his skin and vomited.

He shook his head to try to clear it. That was a mistake. The room threatened to spin out of control.

His phone rang. Somehow, he located the unit and managed to answer. "Hello?"

"Casey? Where's Chuck?"

"Sarah? That you?" he said groggily.

"Of course! Casey, where is Chuck?"

He tried to think. "He … went out back. Through the cage."

"He's not here."

"What?" Try as he might, he couldn't process what she was saying.

"I'm out back now. He's not here, and he's not answering his phone. He's gone."

"What?"

"Casey, Chuck is gone!"


	5. Not So Fast

_Big and overdue thanks to both Baylink and MySoapBox for their excellent beta work. All mistakes, generally from not listening to them, are my own._

* * *

The atmosphere in the Buy More home theater room was a somber one. Beckman and Graham glowered down from the large monitor, every last ounce of their displeasure conveyed in crisp high definition. A still-woozy Casey sat hunched over on the edge of a couch with a cold pack firmly pressed to the back of his neck. Sarah stood to the side of the low coffee table, barely able to contain her concern about Chuck, feeling as helpless now as when she was cornered at the Weinerlicious.

Fulcrum's plan to distract Casey and Sarah had worked to perfection. With the two of them occupied, Chuck had basically vanished. He wasn't answering his phone. A quick survey of the store turned up no witnesses. The recordings from the security cameras along his evacuation route showed only snow.

Nobody had put eyes on Chuck in over twenty minutes. He had vanished, and none of them had any clue what to do next.

"Are we absolutely certain that Fulcrum has captured the asset?" Beckman asked. Her expression of sour disapproval in no way lessened when she unpursed her lips to speak.

Casey gingerly removed the ice pack and glanced at it, almost as if expecting to see blood. "We have to assume they have him," he said. "Delgado let himself be seen at the front of the store, knowing that the protective detail would go after him while Bartowski bugged out. Shafai said they had agents waiting out back. It all fits."

"What else do we know?" Graham asked.

"A number of the store employees are missing," Sarah said. "Morgan Grimes, Lester Patel, Jeff Barnes, and Anna Wu are all unaccounted for."

"Fulcrum could be planning to torture them to get Chuck to talk. Delgado's made similar threats before."

"Patel and Barnes, being tortured for real?" Casey said, quietly enough that only Sarah could hear. "I'd almost pay to watch that."

At the moment, Sarah had little interest in Casey's brusque humor. "Chuck could have found a place to hide," she said. "Maybe he took his friends over to the mall to get his friends out of danger."

Beckman asked, "Then why wouldn't he be taking our calls?"

"He lost his phone? Or maybe his battery went dead." Both ideas were wishful thinking, and she knew it. Everyone else confirmed that with the long silence that followed.

"I have a question," Graham finally said. He leaned a little closer to the camera. "Why are you still alive, Agent Casey?"

"Your concern for my well-being is touching," Casey grumbled quietly enough that only Sarah could hear.

"Fulcrum isn't in the habit of leaving witnesses. I'm curious why they would make an exception for you."

"Unknown. However, I assure you that I intend to make them pay for their oversight."

"Maybe Delgado was more concerned with evacuating his own men than killing Agent Casey," Sarah suggested.

Graham looked unconvinced, but any further comments were delayed by a knock at the door. Sarah walked over and peeked behind a curtain. An NSA agent, clad in the maroon shirt of a corporate Buy More auditor, waited patiently. Sarah nodded to Casey, who unlocked the door via remote, and she opened it. The agent said, "Excuse me, Agent Walker, but there's something back here you should see."

She looked up at the monitor for guidance. "Director?"

"Go. We have a few more questions for Agent Casey."

Given Graham's tone, the excuse for Sarah to leave probably saved him the trouble of ordering her out of the room. She left, slowing only long enough to cast a worried look back as she shut the door. The paranoia of their bosses was clearly growing if they suspected John Casey of anything. He might be many things, but he was no traitor.

"This way," said the NSA agent. Her terse nod of acknowledgment must have conveyed her mood, because he decided to forgo any small talk as he led her towards the back of the store.

As they walked, her fists balled in frustration. These days, the agencies were turning into their own worst enemies. The bureaucracy and the politics were bad enough, but now they were wasting precious time questioning loyalties. For all she knew, Graham might have ordered her out of the room so they could ask Casey about her.

She stiffly cocked her head to one side and, with a forced breath, unclenched her fists. Getting upset wasn't going to help her find Chuck. She needed to calm down.

Sarah tried to ground herself by re-examining the situation. She glanced around the store as her escort guided her towards the door to the cage area. The clean-up crews had divided the responsibilities along party lines, with NSA tackling the Buy More and CIA taking the Weinerlicious. NSA agents, all dressed in maroon shirts, had things at the Buy More pretty well locked down. Under the guise of a surprise corporate inspection, the agents had closed the store and had locked the remaining Buy More employees in the employee break room. With Chuck gone, the only person who might have stood up to maroon shirts was Big Mike, and he had been lured away earlier by a special giveaway of cinnamon buns over at the mall. The NSA would have free run of the store as long as Mike had an appetite. They might have days.

As they entered the cage, her guide said, "According to what Agent Casey told us, the last he saw of Agent Bartowski was when he headed towards the loading dock."

"That's right."

The two passed through the doorway into the cage area. To her surprise, he didn't lead her outside, instead leading her towards the back corner of the room where another agent stood patiently waiting. "As we were finishing our sweep, we spent some extra time examining the loading dock and the cage area. Agent Timmons was the one who thought to check the storage cabinet."

Icy pinpricks danced up and down her back. If Chuck had managed to avoid detection in the cabinet, the NSA agent would have brought Chuck to the front rather than bringing Sarah to the back. Best case, Chuck or some of his friends were badly hurt and the ambulance was on the way. Worst case…

She steeled herself as her escort nodded to the other agent, who pulled open the door to the locker.

Sarah couldn't have been more surprised at what she saw.

Sitting on the floor were a man and a woman, both wearing dark suits. Hands and feet were neatly bound with CAT5 cable. Gags were seated in their mouths. The man leaned against the side of the cabinet, still out cold with a pair of nasty-looking bruises on his face. The woman, lying prone across the man's lap, was just regaining consciousness. Her pained breathing and stunted movements suggested at least one cracked rib, possibly more.

"They with you?" Timmons asked.

Sarah shook her head, still too confused to speak.

"They have CIA badges." He produced the badges to highlight the point.

Sarah stared down at the credentials and then back at the agents for a moment more. She stalked away and whipped out her phone.

Director Graham picked up after a single ring. "Find something?"

"Yes," she said. "Two CIA agents, bound and unconscious in a storage cabinet."

The director paused for just a bit too long. The extra silence spoke volumes. Her eyes narrowed.

"Can you identify them?" he asked.

"Their credentials say Peter Christopher and Amy Boylan."

"I didn't send them."

"But you did send agents," she said. It wasn't a guess. Graham had given it away with his guilty pause moments earlier.

And there was only one reason why Graham would send CIA agents and not tell Sarah.

"We can discuss that later," Graham said. "Get back to the home theater room. We need to figure out what this means."

Without waiting for a response, he hung up.

* * *

So much for calming down.

Part of Sarah wanted to reach into the video screen and throttle Director Graham. The man didn't even have the decency to look embarrassed that he'd been caught sending other agents to check up on her and Casey. She'd known that Beckman and Graham were jumping at their own shadows, but after all the years she'd spent working for Graham, she deserved better, and it was pretty clear Casey felt the same way.

Her pointed questions on the matter had produced only dark looks and unproductive silences. After Graham had made it clear the subject was not to be discussed again, she had reluctantly let it drop in favor of more pressing concerns. But as far as she was concerned, the subject was far from closed.

"I pulled the files on Agents Boylan and Christopher," Graham said. "The two are supposed to be on a stakeout in Missouri."

Casey said, to no one in particular, "Maybe they couldn't find any decent Thai food in the Midwest and just kept driving."

"Whatever Boylan and Christopher were doing there was unapproved. The only explanation I have for their presence is that they are working for Fulcrum."

Sarah tried to phrase her next question as neutrally as possible. "Director, were the agents that you sent on site this morning?"

Agent Graham scowled at the mention. General Beckman cut off his angry retort with a hand on his arm and a question. "Why do you ask, Agent Walker?"

"Somebody put those agents in the locker. The only candidates we have are your CIA agents or Chuck and his co-workers."

"My agents didn't do this," Graham insisted.

"And I'll vote Green Party before I'd believe Bartowski and his band of merry misfits took out two Fulcrum agents," Casey said.

"It was five versus two on their home turf." Sarah asked. "They could have pulled it off."

Casey's grunt said he still didn't buy it.

"We've been proceeding under the assumption that Fulcrum acquired the asset," Beckman said. "Have we done anything to investigate whether the asset might be running?"

Sarah's tongue suddenly felt very thick. "Running, General?"

"At this point, we have no concrete evidence that Fulcrum acquired the asset. The two agents positioned to grab Bartowski were found incapacitated. Agent Walker disabled a third, and Agent Casey took out two more. That leaves one agent to grab Chuck and his friends."

"One known agent," Casey clarified, "and that would be more than enough. Besides, even if Bartowski and company did take out the two Fulcrum agents in the cage area, there could have been others waiting outside."

"Or Chuck took advantage of the confusion and slipped away. We have to consider the possibility."

"Roger that." Casey picked up the remote keyboard for the computer system and started punching at the keys. A detailed map of the greater Los Angeles area appeared on a side monitor.

Graham frowned. "Why would Chuck run? Shouldn't he still have trusted you, Agent Walker? You two seemed to develop a strong rapport."

Casey snorted as he worked.

"Any ideas?" Graham said to her. General Beckman looked at her with interest.

Sarah's face tightened. Ever since the General had suggested the possibility that Chuck might be running, she'd had trouble thinking straight. The idea meshed all too neatly with the way he had avoided her the previous day.

Now she had a real dilemma. She hadn't reported Chuck's strange behavior because she had believed it was some kind of simple misunderstanding. However, more and more his behavior looked to be relevant. She was duty-bound to report what she knew.

But if she reported what she knew, everything was going to unravel quickly – and she might never see him again.

She stalled, torn between two possibilities that she couldn't stomach. "I'm not sure," she said lamely.

General Beckman frowned. "Agent Walker, do we have any reason, no matter how small, to believe that Chuck might be a flight risk?"

An ache grew deep within her chest. She was out of options. The job came first. Period.

She would have to tell them everything.

She took in a deep breath. "General, I–"

"Got him!" Casey said. Three sets of eyes swung to him, with none nearly as grateful as Sarah's. "I remotely activated the GPS beacon on his Nerdmobile. The car's halfway to San Bernadino and moving fast." A blinking red dot had appeared on the map east of their location.

Beckman said, "Good. Agent Casey, go after him and bring him back."

"In one piece?"

"Preferably. Agent Walker, review the surveillance footage again. Maybe we can salvage something that will allow us to determine who took out the two Fulcrum agents. Also, keep trying to contact Chuck. See if you can convince him to pull over and wait for Agent Casey."

"And if I can't?"

"Then I'll have to assume that the asset has lost his faith in both of his handlers. If that's the case, Operation Bartowski will need to be shut down. Chuck's next stop will be an underground bunker, and you two will be re-assigned."

Without another word, the general terminated the teleconference. Casey shot her a look full of hidden meanings before he dashed out of the room.

Sarah swallowed hard. The entire operation was in jeopardy, and if things didn't get fixed in a hurry, yesterday's kiss might be her and Chuck's last. But at least Casey's find had given her some more time.

She picked up her phone and pressed the number two on her speed-dial. The phone rang and rang and rang again. It rolled to voice mail. She hung up and redialed.

The phone kept ringing. She bit her lower lip in frustration. "C'mon, Chuck," she urged. "Pick up!"

* * *

Casey rocketed down the left lane of a Los Angeles highway. He smiled grimly. The trademark black sedan he had requisitioned to replace the Crown Vic was a pain at times, given that this particular model screamed "cop" to anyone in the know. The upside was that, when you needed to get somewhere in a hurry, nobody messed with you. Even the motorcycle cop who clocked the car doing one-twenty-five barely twitched as the sedan flew past.

Still, a thirty-minute head start was not an easy thing to overcome. The Herder was really moving. Leave it to Bartowski to discover he had a lead foot just when Casey needed to chase him down.

The open laptop on the passenger seat displayed a map tracking the location of the Herder. The car had turned north before getting to San Bernadino. Where did Bartowski think he was going? Las Vegas? Was he planning on just driving as far as he could? Maybe he flashed on some mothballed government hole-in-the-ground out in the desert that he planned to use as a hideout.

It was a moot point. Traffic had thinned once Casey hit I-15, and he'd been able to narrow the gap even faster once he'd hit the back side of Cajon Pass. He was now coming into the fringes of Victorville, about five miles back and closing fast. He liked his chances in a high-speed pursuit with Bartowski - not that there would be much of a pursuit once he got close enough. He would see to that.

His hand sought out a small electronic device that looked more like a video game controller than any kind of spy device. He punched in a sequence of numbers, received a beeping acknowledgment and replaced the device on the seat with a smirk. Somewhere ahead, the engine on the Herder was sputtering as the gas cut off, leaving the car to glide to the shoulder with what momentum remained. Now he was close enough that, after Bartowski figured out that he wasn't going to be able to restart the car, he wouldn't be able to wander far before Casey got there.

Casey watched the sides of the road carefully for the next couple of miles, his eyes finding his prey just past mile marker 217. The hood of the Herder stretched towards the sky, a supplicant to whatever automotive gods might help the engine start. Casey pulled in behind it. Traffic whizzed past as the sedan slowed to a halt, tires coaxing small clouds of dust from the shoulder.

He opened his door. "Having car trouble?" he called smugly as he got out, punctuating the comment with a slam of the door. His footsteps crunched in the gravelly dirt as he walked up.

He was unpleasantly surprised to find Lester sitting in the driver's seat. "Casey?" the man asked in surprise.

Anna peeked from behind the hood, her hair pulled back through the loop in a Nerd Herd baseball cap and a streak of grease on her cheek. "What are you doing here?"

Casey didn't gape often, but his mouth decided this was an appropriate occasion to try it again. "No, the question is what are you two doing here?"

Lester said, "Service call."

"A service call. Out here."

"Yeah," Anna said, going back to work on the engine. "Some guy in Barstow has a desktop and an in-home service contract." Lester helpfully held up the work order.

"And Bartowski gave the assignment to you?"

"Along with this piece of junk," Lester said. "I thought there was something special about this Herder since Chuck kept it to himself all the time, but it's pretty obvious this one's just as bad as the rest of them. No wonder Detroit is headed straight into the crapper."

Anna's head poked back around the hood. "It's a Toyota Matrix."

"Sure, defend your homeland."

"Toyota is a Japanese company."

"So?"

"I'm from Taiwan, you bai chi!"

Ignoring the spat, Casey turned and stormed back to the sedan.

Lester said, "Wait, Casey, you can't leave us here!"

"The engine's probably just flooded," he yelled without turning around. "Let it sit for another minute, then try it again."

Casey got back into the sedan and hastily slammed the door, almost catching his foot in the process. He punched the gas line release code into the Herder remote and spiked it off the passenger seat to thump around the floorboard. The key turned in the ignition. The engine roared. Tires and mind spun furiously as both searched for traction.

Where the hell was Bartowski?


	6. Truth or Consequences

Anna and Lester stared stupidly after Casey as his car shot across three lanes of traffic and the grassy median. He elbowed his way onto the southbound freeway, forcing the driver of a late model Mustang to slam on the brakes. The driver flipped Casey the bird. Luckily for the driver, Casey cared about as much about the gesture as the tracks his squealing tires left on the pavement.

Right now, the sole focus of Casey's attention was Chuck Bartowski. Either he had somehow managed to get his friends away before he was captured, or he had set up a seventy-mile wild goose chase. Even worse, he had set up the chase by putting six figures worth of government equipment into the hands of Wu and Patel.

Casey's face twisted into an angry grimace. Bartowski had better hope that he was heading for some dark hole to be tortured, because if not, once Casey found Bartowski, the dark hole would be a fairy tale by comparison.

After a moment of fantasy involving Bartowski, a length of rope and a ticked-off rattlesnake, Casey's phone was at his ear. Walker answered quickly, anxiously.

"Walker here."

"Bartowski wasn't with the Herder."

"What?!"

"He gave the car to Patel and Wu and fed them a Nerd Herd job in Barstow. It's looking more and more like Bartowski's running."

Casey could almost hear the gears in her head turning. "Somebody still could have grabbed him," she said stubbornly.

"He wouldn't give that car to Anna and Lester by accident. Bartowski knew we'd activate the beacon, and he knew we'd come after it. He's trying to ditch us."

Her initial silence suggested that she had run out of reasons to argue. Her prolonged silence suggested that she had run out of ideas for finding Bartowski.

Casey shifted over a lane to skip past a bright white pick-up. He frowned. Bartowski taking off made little enough sense, but Bartowski taking off without Walker made zero sense. Unless Walker was part of it. Unless Walker was playing Casey as well. She was good enough to pull it off.

That thought evaporated when she finally spoke again. "Casey, do you know why he might be running?" she asked. Her voice was a little quieter and almost vulnerable.

If she was acting, it was a virtuoso performance.

Casey gathered his thoughts. He didn't want Walker to find out about his efforts to distance Bartowski from her, but at the same time, a simple 'I don't know' would just raise her suspicions. He had to tread carefully.

"Now that I think about it, he has been acting a little strangely lately," he said. "He's been getting more and more paranoid, like he doesn't trust me. It happens with assets. 'Long-term field exposure for assets tends to foster a proclivity towards dementia and …'"

"'… psychosis the longer they are subjected to stressful situations beyond their ken.' I took the same training. But Casey, do you really think he took off because he became hyperparanoid from too many missions?

"At this point, I'm not sure we can rule out anything."

"I think we can rule out a mental breakdown. I haven't noticed any symptoms."

The best defense was a good offense. "Maybe you were distracted."

"Distracted?! By what, exactly?"

"A handler should be focused on an asset's mind and not his … other parts." He thought he caught the slightest of hitches in her next breath. He pushed his advantage. "Might have kept you from seeing what was right in front of your nose. Very unprofessional, wouldn't you agree?"

"As opposed to, say, taking out your frustrations on a fellow agent while said asset is missing? And what exactly is your excuse for not noticing any symptoms before now?"

Casey had to give Walker one thing - she was a cool customer when the pressure was on. That was just one of many things that made her a great partner, probably the best he'd ever had.

And that made all of this that much harder.

Casey dodged around a Jeep that was lollygagging in the left lane. He slowed down long enough to shoot a dirty look at the driver, a young man more interested in sending text messages than watching the road. As Casey shoved the accelerator back down to the floor, he said, "Fine, let's rule out a breakdown. Any luck with the surveillance?" he said.

"The CIA agents had to be Fulcrum. They carried Vesper-53's, devices that jammed all the cameras within 50 feet. The cameras out front, inside the store, and covering the loading dock all started recording snow about the time Delgado walked into the Buy More."

"Fantastic. So the good news is that we're sure these guys were Fulcrum. The bad is that we still have no indication who decided to gift them with a little nap, and we haven't got the faintest idea where Bartowski went."

"Well, that's only partially true. A camera covering the west exterior of the store caught a shot of Chuck walking with Jeff."

Finally, they had something. "Bartowski and Barnes left together?"

"Yes. Chuck looked like he was in a hurry. Jeff looked like he didn't have a clue what was going on."

"That last part doesn't mean much. That's pretty much Barnes's day-to-day existence."

"At least we verified that Chuck left on his own."

Casey thought for a moment. "Could Barnes and Bartowski have left in Barnes's van?"

"Nope. I checked. Jeff, Lester, Anna – all their vehicles are still in the parking lot."

"Did Chuck call anybody?"

"No calls from Chuck's phone. I also checked all calls placed from the phones of Chuck's friends. Nothing of note."

"What about locating Jeff or Morgan?"

"Also not picking up. I doubt that's a big deal. If Lester and Anna didn't know anything, I don't think Chuck would endanger any of them by telling them anything important."

"Not to mention that they tend to blab pretty easily. Texts? Email? Bank or credit cards?"

"Casey, I have done this before. Nothing there either, but we're watching."

"Well, he's not going to get too far without popping up somewhere on the grid. Keep on it." He suppressed a growl of frustration and rubbed the back of his neck. "We got anything else?"

"Shafai is in custody, but predictably, she's not talking. The CIA team finished with the Weinerlicious, so I've got them working on obtaining security footage from the various tenants. Maybe we can reconstruct how Chuck left the mall."

"That's pretty thin."

"I'm open to suggestions."

He had none for her, but a few choice ones for the drivers in his way. He slalomed through three more cars, cursing under his breath.

Up ahead, the road started climbing towards Cajon Pass. He started doing the math on how far ahead Bartowski would be by the time Casey got back to Echo Park, and he came up with a simple answer. Too far. Far enough that reeling Bartowski back in wasn't going to be the simple exercise he had envisioned.

Casey had prepared for many contingencies in the hours he had spent on Chuck watch, but had given little thought to a scenario where Chuck fled their custody. Luckily, training sometimes superceded thought, and Casey had an ace in the hole that he intended to deploy.

* * *

Sarah hung up her phone with a frown. She didn't like holding out on her partner, especially when Chuck might be in danger. However, since Casey was holding out on her, she found it necessary to return the favor.

Before the Fulcrum agents had entered the Buy More, the store's surveillance network had worked just fine. Cameras captured Big Mike delivering a package to Chuck and the care Chuck took in opening it. The same cameras caught Casey watching Chuck the entire time. Casey hadn't seen fit to mention it, and she could only come up with a couple of reasons why he might omit something that important. Her best guess was that Casey was determined to find Chuck first, without her involvement. More unlikely, but far more frightening, was the idea that Casey had known about the package in advance and didn't want her to find it. Either way, he clearly had his own agenda.

This wasn't the first time Casey had held out on her. In the past, she'd written those instances off as a character flaw. Casey liked to feel superior, so he'd held some things back. She had let some minor things go, even ignored a few not-so-minor things that really bothered her, because she had believed Casey had Chuck's best interests at heart. But with Casey's motives unclear while Chuck potentially was in danger, she wasn't about to be so understanding. She had to get to Chuck first.

She looked down at the Nerd Herd desk, taking one more look at the remains of the packaging that she had retrieved from where Chuck had stashed them. The remains told her little, other than somebody had gone through great lengths to hide the package's origin. The order had disappeared from the Globex delivery system, if it had ever been there. The CIA had brought in the courier for questioning, but initial reports were that he thought it was a legit delivery. Unless they dragged something different out of him, the packaging itself was a dead end.

Sarah had found more useful information from some high-angle camera footage. Somebody had sent Chuck a phone and made a call to him. The audio wasn't available on their network of bugs, as the phone contained the same type of anti-eavesdropping device that her own phone carried. However, she had been able to watch Chuck's reactions during the conversation, had been able to see him go through a range of emotions before hiding the packaging and leaving with a nervous determination.

She was a little worried that Chuck was being blackmailed. The manila envelope could easily have contained photographs to demonstrate how vulnerable his friends and family were. Just in case, she had assigned agents to watch Ellie and Awesome, and she'd assign one to Morgan as soon as she could find him. She was leaving nothing to chance.

Without knowing who the caller was, guessing his game was all but impossible. She was glad to have some idea where the reason for Chuck's sudden departure originated, but really that was just a silver lining. She still had no idea whether he was running away or following instructions.

Frustrated, Sarah replaced the packaging in the file cabinet to avoid tipping off Casey and pursued her only other lead. She walked to the parking lot to try to track Chuck's trail through the forest of SUVs and import sedans.

People tended to walk the shortest possible path, so normally determining where a person was heading was just an exercise in extrapolation. However, she couldn't rule out the idea that Chuck was sharp enough to throw off pursuit by heading in the wrong direction. Casey might underestimate Chuck, but Sarah wouldn't. She knew him too well.

His path pointed to a bank of stores in an adjacent strip. She deliberately took an oblique route further into the parking lot so she could survey the store names and see if any jumped out at her. She spotted what she was looking for almost immediately, nestled between a bead shop and an eBay retailer. Spy Hard was owned by one of Chuck's friends. It was a likely destination.

She had been in the store a time or two, as she had every store in the plaza and the neighboring mall. With Chuck working at the Buy More, this was home turf, and it was her job to know every corner of the complex. She knew the store's owner was Jay Davis, a graduate of a local technical school who'd applied to join several intelligence organizations and been denied. After that, he bounced around a few area companies doing various low-level tech jobs before starting up the store with a small inheritance left by his grandmother. He seemed clean, but right now everyone was a suspect.

Energized by the possibility of finally getting somewhere, her stride quickened. She crossed the intervening distance and pushed open the door to the shop. At the moment, the would-be agent was nowhere to be seen. She took a quick moment to re-familiarize herself with the store's layout, then called out, "Hello?"

For a long moment, there was only silence. Then, she detected movement beyond the maze of bookcases that filled the store. A chair rolled across a hard floor. Something solid was set down on a table. Cautious footsteps grew louder as somebody approached.

Sarah put on her friendliest smile as Jay emerged from between two sets of high bookcases, a nervous expression painted on his face. He stopped at a safe distance. "You're Sarah, right?" he said without preamble.

Her smile faded slightly. "That's right."

"Chuck told me that you'd probably be by. You or a man named John Casey. I was hoping it would be you."

"Why's that?"

Jay paused as if a single misspoken word could lead to something very bad. He finally said, "Because Chuck told me that I could trust you. He said if you gave me your word that you wouldn't let anything happen to me, I'd be fine. John Casey … well, let's just say Chuck strongly suggested I talk to you."

"What can you tell me?"

He eyed her carefully. "Your word first, if you don't mind. Chuck told me that if you give me your word, I should go ahead and tell you everything I know."

Sarah didn't like making deals blindly, but time was wasting and she needed the information. "You have my word," she said. "If you tell me everything, and I mean everything, I'll make sure nothing happens to you."

Jay's shoulders dropped as he took in a relieved breath. He even managed a small smile. "Thank you."

"Tell me what you know."

Sarah followed Jay as he walked towards the register. He said, "Chuck told me that there are two pieces of information that you'd want. The first is that he borrowed my car."

That explained how Chuck was traveling. "I'll need to know the color, model, and license plate number."

Jay punched No Sale and the register drawer slid open. He pulled out a scrap of paper and handed it to Sarah. On it were the color, model and license plate number – in Chuck's handwriting. She shivered. She felt like a puppet. She knew Chuck was smart and that he was starting to get a firm handle on the spy game, but he seemed two or even three steps ahead of her at this point.

As she stared at the sheet, she asked, "What's the second piece of information?"

There was a long pause. She looked up to see Jay's probing eyes on her. "Well?" she prompted.

He took a deep breath. "He knows about the chip in the watch."

The color fled from her face. General Beckman had been right. Chuck was running.

He was running from Sarah.

* * *

Jay's two-door hatchback bounced down the right lane of the highway. While the car had probably been a really sweet ride back during the Clinton administration, it had not aged well. The interior had faded from a once-fashionable maroon to a never-fashionable salmon, except in a few places where Jay had patched rips in the fabric with small pieces of duct tape. It accelerated like a gimpy turtle and reeked of Jay's long-kicked smoking habit. Between the large chips in dark exterior paint and the rust that had resulted, the car had become the punchline to the question "What's black and white and red all over?" However, to Chuck, the car was no joke. The car was his best shot at escaping.

Escaping. Chuck stared at the road ahead, hardly believing what he was doing. He was running, not just from Fulcrum, but from the CIA and the NSA.

He glanced down at the watch in the car's cup holder. He was running from a lot of things.

A jumble of emotions swirled through his chest, three parts fear, two parts heartache, one part adrenaline-driven euphoria. The last surprised him. The hunt was thrilling in its own way, even as the quarry. Maybe it was just a naïve excitement from finally taking matters into his own hands, but a part of him was actually enjoying this.

The tricky thing was that he couldn't just fall off the radar. If the trail grew cold, people might get desperate. They might take more drastic measures and go after Ellie and Morgan and the rest, thinking Chuck's friends and family would know where he was. That was unacceptable.

So he had to keep everyone busy chasing him, keep them believing that they were closing in on him while he somehow avoided capture. Since he didn't have the resources the agencies did, he was going to need to take some calculated risks.

Like the damn watch.

He glanced over at his passenger. Jeff slept against the door, drool dribbling down to his chin, his mouth open so wide that Chuck could probably toss small beanbags into it like some carnival game. Jeff wouldn't be sleeping so peacefully if he knew everything that was happening or the part he'd be playing.

One thing was for sure – this was no game. The guns wouldn't have badly-calibrated sights or light beams for ammunition. There would be no slapping another dollar on the counter for a second round if the first didn't go so well. Everyone involved was playing for keeps. Chuck needed to remember that.

It wasn't all doom and gloom. Certain things were in his favor. He had friends helping him. He wasn't an agent, so he didn't think like an agent, which might make his next moves tougher for his pursuers to read.

The biggest advantage was that the discovery of the device in the watch had given him some time to draw up some plans, enough to have a reasonable confidence that his harebrained scheme might actually work. The only thing he hadn't been able to figure out was how to get a head start, and Fulcrum had unwittingly dropped the perfect opportunity right into his lap. He was going to need a few more breaks like that if he was going to come out of this alive.

Up ahead, a green highway sign pointed to his exit. This was the first decision point of many, and he took it without hesitation. Self-doubt was a luxury he couldn't afford.

Occasionally, though, his thoughts turned to Sarah, and self-doubt was all but unavoidable.


	7. Trails and Betrayals

_Baylink keeps doing great beta work, and then I go and change things after the fact. All mistakes are mine..._

* * *

Information was the lifeblood of any good agent. Information was power. Used properly, it was a currency to be traded, a tool to provide leverage, or the deciding edge in a mission otherwise doomed to failure.

In Sarah's world, people understood the value of information. The moment somebody else learned a secret, that person became a threat to be neutralized. So every agent quickly learned to handle his arsenal of secrets like the loaded weapons they were – with caution and respect, kept carefully concealed. It became second nature. Information about an agent couldn't be used if nobody else possessed it, and people unaware of a threat couldn't neutralize it.

A harder lesson was that many secrets had a shelf life. Some secrets became less useful as the information grew stale. Other secrets gradually devalued as more people learned them. The most dangerous secrets were like time bombs, where a key person was almost certain to learn the secret and, when they did, everything would blow up with unpredictable, usually spectacular consequences.

Apparently the timer on the watch's secret read all zeros.

Sarah stared helplessly at Jay, realizing what her inaction had done. When the Fulcrum agents had arrived that morning, of course Chuck would have felt like he had to run. He wouldn't know who to trust. If she had come clean sooner…

Jay's quiet voice shook her from her thoughts. Her mind registered the sounds, but not the words. "I'm sorry?" she asked.

"Are you all right?" Jay asked again, genuine concern on his face.

She realized she had let her emotions show, and in front of a stranger whose help she needed, no less. Her baseline smile snapped quickly into place. "Of course."

Surprisingly, Jay laughed. Her eyes narrowed. "What's so funny?" she asked.

"Nothing. It's only … Chuck told me that I could trust you, but also that you were a terrific liar. I couldn't understand what he meant until just now."

A half-dozen emotions coursed through her, ranging from hurt to anger. She had no time for any of them. She needed everything that Jay knew.

Time to work.

"All this must have been a lot to take in," she said.

"Yeah, I'd say so."

"How much did he tell you?"

"Not much. Casey's an agent. You're an agent. Chuck knows some things that could be dangerous in the wrong hands."

"Very dangerous," she said.

"Is that why you two set up the boyfriend-girlfriend thing? So you could protect him?"

She saw a chance to build a little sympathy. She gave a rueful little laugh and said, "Something like that. I thought we had at least become friends."

"He must believe that, at least a little."

"What makes you say that?"

"He could've made this much harder for you."

Harder? Chuck had avoided her after he discovered the device. He had disappeared while Fulcrum agents were on the loose. He had up and left after she had dared to open herself up to him. While she was glad that there was something that explained Chuck's behavior, part of her ached. The last twenty-four hours couldn't have been any harder.

With some effort, she kept a smile on her face and forced herself to focus on what Jay had said. "How could he have made this harder?" she asked.

"He wanted you to come talk to me."

"How do you know that?"

"Chuck left a text message for me to send if you didn't show up here."

"What message?"

Jay pulled his phone from a front pocket of his jeans. As he spoke, he fiddled with the buttons. "I was supposed to give you ninety minutes from when Chuck left. If you didn't show by then, I was supposed to send this message to you. He knew you'd track me down at the store. Here."

He passed the phone to her. Chuck had apparently typed the message in a serious hurry, lacking his usually impeccable capitalization and punctuation. The message read 'FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear'.

A sick feeling grew in her stomach. Once before, on a rooftop helicopter pad when he was to be moved underground, Chuck had asked her to make things right for Morgan and Ellie once he was gone. Was he calling in that one last favor, thinking he would never return?

Sarah handed the phone back, making no effort to hide her puzzlement. That didn't make sense. Maybe Chuck didn't feel like he had a choice, but if he truly didn't trust her, would he really ask her to do something that was that important to him? And if he trusted her, then what was the point of all this?

What was she missing?

She didn't know. But Jay might.

"You're a good friend for helping Chuck out like this," she said. "Most people would have run."

"Chuck told me it would be better for me if I stayed. He said I'd just look guilty if I ran."

"True, but that didn't stop Chuck from running."

"Yeah, well, he's been doing this since before yesterday afternoon. I'm only here because I found the chip. I decided my best chances were to try to get a clean slate by telling the government everything that I knew."

"Did you really tell me everything?"

Jay hesitated. He had a decent poker face that he put up in a hurry, but that initial instant told her there was more there.

Out of habit, her tone became insistent, almost hostile. "We had a deal. You told me that you'd tell me everything."

"I did."

"There's something you're not telling me. What is it?"

"I can't tell you what you want to know.

"What do you think I want to know?"

"Where he went."

"Why can't you tell me?"

"Because I don't know. Chuck wouldn't tell me. He said that what I didn't know couldn't get me into trouble."

That made sense. Chuck wasn't about to put his friends in any danger if he could help it, and giving them any information would certainly do that.

Unfortunately, if Jay didn't know where Chuck was, she had nothing to help her find him. She would put out a BOLO on the car, but it wouldn't help. In his own way, Chuck had already told her the car was a dead end by leaving the note. If he had known that she would look for it, he would have taken steps to keep the car from being found.

It couldn't end here. There had to be more.

"Did he tell you anything else? Anything at all?"

Too late, she realized her mask had slipped again. She hadn't been the cool, collected agent when she delivered that last plea. The forcefulness had been the same, but it had clearly been driven by a different need than an agent seeking her asset.

Jay thoughtfully stared at her. She had the strangest feeling that he was weighing her words, assessing her in some way. She felt like she were on trial, but she had no idea for what.

"Jay, please," she said. "This is really important."

"For Chuck? Or for you?"

"For Chuck. He's in real danger."

"The way he left, it seems like he thinks the danger might come from you."

"No. It's my job to protect him."

"Is it just your job?"

She had expected to be asked about the kind of danger, so his question caught her off guard. She stared blankly at him as she considered her answer.

Part of her tried to believe it was just her job. Things were so much simpler that way. Follow orders, follow protocols, finish the job. However, that ship had long since sailed, and she knew it. The job may always come first, but it wasn't just about the job. It hadn't been for a long time.

Her agent training told her to dissemble, but her experiences with people like Ellie and Morgan had shown her that dishonesty didn't work very well in Chuck's world. And this might be her last chance to find him.

Sarah did something she rarely did – she let her defenses down. "No," she said. "It's not just my job."

For a long moment, the two just stared at each. A mix of consternation and despair churned in her chest. She was just about to plead with him once more when he rendered his verdict. "Text him," he said.

"I've tried. He won't respond."

"Text him the words 'Jay is in the clear.' You'll get an answer."

Sarah felt a sliver of hope. She pulled out the phone and sent the message.

Minutes passed, each one a tortuous eternity. Unwavering in his confidence, Jay wandered back behind the register to organize some paperwork.

Finally, she felt the phone vibrate in her hand. Chuck's face appeared with a tremendous grin. She tapped a button to open the message. "Meet me," was all it said.

Meet him? Where?

Another riddle, but one Sarah was glad to have.

The corners of her mouth turned upwards. She shared her grateful smile with Jay, and was surprised how good it felt when he smiled back.

* * *

"Keep busy, Bartowski," Chuck muttered to himself.

He glanced around the small café. Blessed with a free WiFi connection, Chuck was trying to get some work done. However, between his worries about Sarah and his worries that government agents or splinter group radicals would storm the place at any moment and grab him, it was tough to stay focused. But he needed to bear down. He had so much to do.

His fingers danced across the keyboard of the small but surprisingly powerful laptop. Right now, the machine couldn't be traced back to him. He knew this for certain because he was the one that refurbished it. He had scrubbed it clean and rebuilt it from the ground up.

The laptop wasn't so much stolen from the Buy More as put on a deferred schedule of payment. Chuck had submitted a request to the employee purchase plan, which took money directly from an employee's next paycheck to pay for in-store purchases. Big Mike easily took two to three days to process forms under the best of conditions, and to buy even more time, Chuck had buried the request in a pile of paperwork that Big Mike had been avoiding. Technically, the computer didn't belong to Chuck yet, but he would have plausible deniability if Big Mike decided to make a stink about it.

Chuck hated the need for the games, but he needed a clean system. Some agent could get clever and figure out a way to trace a computer with ties to him. He could forgive himself if he wasn't a good enough agent to pull everything off, but he wasn't going to change who he was, and he certainly wasn't going to be out-nerded. The computer was one fewer thing to worry about, and these days one fewer worry seemed like a significant victory.

A much bigger victory was that, with Jeff finally sent away, all of Chuck's friends and family should now be safe. No doubt various agents would come nosing around to ask their questions, but they'd quickly figure out that Chuck had been smart enough not to tell them anything. Soon enough, the only trails left would lead government and Fulcrum agents alike out of Los Angeles. Part one of his plan was almost complete.

At this point, thoughts of Sarah distracted him more than anything. Since he had left the Buy More that morning, he had second-guessed and third-guessed and sixteenth-guessed how to handle her. Had it really been only a day ago that she had kissed him outside the Weinerlicious? So much had changed. Or had it?

He sighed heavily. That made seventeen.

He typed in a few more words and fired off the carefully-crafted email, then toggled to the spreadsheet of his master plan once more. A substantial number of the color-coded cells had been changed to strikethrough font to indicate they had been completed; he did the same with the email. A quick check of the clock confirmed that he had time for one last critical to-do before he left. He pulled out a pay-as-you-go cell phone and punched in a number.

The phone rang three times. A female voice answered. "Hello?"

"Is this Miss Gwendoline Yeo?"

"Yes."

Chuck grinned. "Nice alias."

There was a long pause at the other end. "I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number."

"Don't hang up, don't hang up! This is Chuck Bartowski."

Another long pause. "Chuck. I didn't expect to be hearing from you again. How did you find me?"

"I had a little help. Listen, I need a favor."

Chuck hurriedly explained what he needed. He hadn't been sure whether the woman would be willing to help him, but because of their past, she owed him one. She was almost eager to repay her debt.

With a relieved sigh, he hung up the phone. That was one more ally on his side.

This wasn't a time to be chintzy about calling in favors. Uncollected debts did a dead man little good.

* * *

The GPS transmitter in Chuck's phone had been disabled, so Sarah needed help from the CIA to track down its location. Her contacts were able to determine the tower that Chuck's cell phone had used to send the text message to her. That had narrowed the location to about twenty square blocks.

Normally, that wouldn't have been enough to track a person down, but Sarah recognized the general area and had a hunch. She parked her Porsche a few blocks south of the Santa Monica pier and walked down towards the sand. This was the beach where Chuck had gone to gather his thoughts after the events of their 'first date'. This was where Chuck and Sarah had talked in the light of the early morning sun.

This was where Sarah had told Chuck to trust her.

She stopped at the edge of the parking lot, steadying herself against an aluminum signpost as she took off her athletic shoes and socks. Lacing fingers into the heel of each shoe, she walked out onto the beach.

To her left, a lonely gull emitted a plaintive cry as its beady eyes alternately scanned the ground and water below. The bird hovered on updrafts spawned by the warmth of the midday sun, aimlessly shifting to the left or right at the mercy of the changing currents. The same wind threw Sarah's hair back across her shoulders and forced her to squint a bit as her eyes searched the beach. Glittering crystals of sand clung to her toes the way she clung to the hope that she would soon find Chuck.

A solitary figure sat staring at the water. The profile was familiar, but it wasn't the one Sarah was hoping to see. Wondering what that meant, Sarah took the last few steps and sat down.

"Hi, Morgan," she said.

The bearded man, still clad in his Buy More green polo and khaki pants, had Chuck's iPhone cradled in both hands between his bent legs. He didn't respond, instead choosing to watch another wave crash onto the shore. The ocean breathed its unmistakable perfume of salt and seaweed and countless other components, unique like a fingerprint. The heady mix stirred memories so powerful that, for a moment, Sarah forgot why she was there.

A shake of Morgan's head shook Sarah from her trance. "Chuck said you'd find me after I texted you," he said. "I didn't believe him."

Her heart sank. Part of her had hoped that Chuck might be nearby, but Morgan's words had pretty much dispelled that idea. Not knowing how much Morgan knew, she decided to keep things simple. "Lucky guess. This place means something to Chuck and me."

"He told me. You ended up watching the sunrise here on your first date?"

"That's right." Sarah let her face break into a slightly wistful smile at the memory. "What else did he tell you?"

Morgan finally turned towards Sarah, regarding her with eyes far more thoughtful than usual. "Not much. Just that you'd find me."

The words felt like an odd echo of something Chuck had said to her in this very spot.

"_There's nowhere I can run, is there," Chuck said._

"_Not from us," Sarah replied. Sensing the emotions churning in Chuck's chest, she said, "Talk to me, Chuck." _

If only he were here to talk to her now. Why had Chuck brought her here? Was it merely a delay tactic? Was it some kind of poetic reference to that first night, a pointed reminder that she had asked him to trust him? Or was there some other message she was missing? "Talk to me, Chuck," she whispered under her breath.

Perhaps feeling the need to fill in for his friend, Morgan took a deep breath. "As close as I am to Chuck, I don't pretend to understand him, especially not lately. Take this morning for example. What he asked me to do makes no sense. But do you know why I did it?"

A twist of her head told him she didn't.

"Because he always, always puts other people before himself. I may not always understand how - and this one definitely falls into that category - but Chuck Bartowski always puts the people he cares about first."

Sarah couldn't help but feel a little slighted. After all, Chuck was supposed to care about her, too. "Where is he, Morgan?"

Morgan looked almost excited that she didn't know. "He didn't tell you either? I mean, of course he didn't. You and I, we both have a bond with Chuck. It's a little different; you have the whole sexual intimacy thing, but–"

"Morgan!"

His expression turned apologetic. "Sorry. I get a little carried away sometimes." He turned back to stare out at the water.

She couldn't help but smile a little smile. Morgan was more than a little strange at times, but he grew on a person after a while. Like mold, Casey had once said when she'd suggested the same thing.

She said, "So why do you think Chuck set all this up? He went through a lot of trouble, and it must have been important if he gave up his phone."

"Sarah, there are times when that boy is one tough fortune cookie to crack. The only thing I got? Chuck must have had a reason he wanted you to talk to me."

She tried not to think about the text message Chuck had given to Jay. She so badly didn't want it to be that Chuck just wanted her to talk to Morgan, to make it OK that he was leaving.

In an effort to redirect the conversation, she said, "You really have a lot of faith in Chuck, don't you."

"I trust him with my life. This was nothing."

"Even though he wouldn't tell you why."

Something about the comment resonated with Morgan, because he stopped his pensive examination of the ocean and turned towards Sarah. "Just because Chuck and I are best friends doesn't mean that we can't have a few secrets."

She eyed him carefully. "That seems like an odd sentiment coming from you."

He gave a guilty little chuckle as he glanced down at the sand between his legs. "Well, those are Chuck's words, not mine. He reminded me of that this morning, actually. But as I've been sitting here thinking about it, and he's right. It's fine to have secrets, as long as there's a good reason for them. As long as we have each other's best interests at heart."

"So how does Chuck's leaving without telling me anything have my best interests at heart?"

"I don't know."

She pulled up a handful of sand and watched it slip away through her fingers, eluding her grasp much the same way Chuck's plan was.

"What I can tell you is that whatever reason Chuck has for not including you has nothing to do with not caring about you."

She got lost in the forest of negatives. A nervous little laugh escaped her lips. "What was that?"

"You mean the world to him, Sarah. The way he talks about you, the way he looks at you ... there's no secret there. It's completely obvious."

She couldn't deny the quivering excitement that Morgan's words triggered deep in her chest. Still, Chuck was gone, and the question remained unanswered. "So why didn't he just tell me?"

"There's really only two possible explanations. The first is that we just don't understand what he's doing, which in my experience is very possible."

"And the other?"

His eyes fixed on her. "You've done something to lose his trust. But that can't be it. What could you possibly have done to lose Chuck's trust?"

A child's shriek triggered her agent's reflex, and she involuntarily looked up. A particularly large wave crashed down onto the shore. The frothing remnants of the wave attacked the little girl's sand castle and scraped the sand clean of any evidence that it had once been there. The girl stared down at the sand in bemusement.

Morgan took one more look around the beach, and then he looked over at Sarah. "Well, you'd better get going."

"Going?"

"You need to catch up with Ellie before she heads off to the hospital for rounds."

Sarah stared at Morgan.

"Didn't I tell you?"

"No, you didn't," she said, working hard to keep an even tone.

Morgan accepted his oversight with remarkable nonchalance. "Chuck told me that, if you found me, you should go talk to Ellie at the apartment."

"Did he say why?"

"No, but Chuck always has a good reason."

She agreed. However, it had taken her nearly 40 minutes to drive down to the beach, and it would be another 30 minutes before she could make it to the Echo Park apartment.

Again, she found herself wondering whether this was all nothing more than some kind of delay tactic. Chuck could be getting further away from her with every second that passed.

* * *

Casey's cell phone rang as he shut the door to his apartment. The display read 'Private Number'. He flipped his phone open and pinned it between his cheek and shoulder as he struggled out of his jacket. "Casey here."

"Hello, Agent Casey," a familiar voice said.

"Representative Jennings." Casey was suddenly all too aware of the throbbing at the back of his neck. His jacket smacked into the leather recliner.

"How are we feeling?" Jennings asked.

Casey's mouth curled into a wry smile. "A bit ticked off, to tell you the truth."

"Understandable, I suppose."

"You suppose?!"

Casey's gut clenched as he forced out words that still felt so wrong to say. "We're on the same damn side," he said. "I'm Fulcrum now."


	8. Divided Loyalties

Marine Corps. NSA. Now Fulcrum.

How quickly things changed.

A month ago – hell, a week ago – anyone who dared suggest John Casey would join Fulcrum would have found himself crumpled up like a ball of wet newspaper and discarded in the nearest dumpster. After all, Casey had spent his entire career loyally defending his country, willing to do anything, anywhere, with no more reason than his government's say-so. Yet here he was, willingly signed up with Fulcrum, a group with an agenda that often ran counter to the government's.

Go figure.

At the moment, though, his defection wasn't the betrayal that concerned him. The thing was, this morning's attack made no sense. Fulcrum hadn't gotten anything from him yet. Why would Jennings bother to accept Casey's allegiance the previous night only to try to take him out with a basic frontal assault the next morning? And as Graham had so pointedly noted, why wasn't Casey dead? Delgado could have easily finished the job.

No, Fulcrum hadn't wanted to kill him, but something was going on, and he needed answers. So as much as Casey wanted to fire off a biting remark and snap his phone shut, he had to settle for firing off the first volley. "You mind telling me why Fulcrum agents attacked me?"

"You didn't tell us that Chuck Bartowski is the Intersect," Jennings said.

"I didn't tell you a lot of things. Can I expect an attack every time I don't volunteer what you need?"

"C'mon, Major. You of all people know how badly we want the Intersect. You've seen it firsthand. Yet you chose not to tell us. That's not the most promising start to your Fulcrum career."

Casey re-centered the speaker of the phone on his ear. "Our deal said nothing about handing over any government agents or assets. In fact, we specified that I would never be put in that position."

"When we made the deal, we thought we had the Intersect. Bryce Larkin is currently shadowing one of our men, and we had a nice little trap laid out for him. Now it turns out that Larkin is useless, and you could have easily handed Bartowski to us."

"I told you up front that I wouldn't betray any agents, and that I have one more mission to complete before I could actively join Fulcrum. You agreed to both conditions."

"We never would have agreed had we known the Intersect is that mission. You cannot have divided loyalties, Major."

"I don't. My loyalty is to Fulcrum – after this mission."

"But you can see why I might think that you weren't holding up your end of the bargain."

Casey shook his head and bit back a sardonic laugh. Like any good politician, Jennings was spinning like a top, trying to find ways to twist things to his advantage. Meanwhile, Bartowski was getting further away with each passing second. Casey would have to do something about both.

He turned and walked over to the kitchen. Frowning, he crouched down by one of the cabinet and opened it. As he peered inside, he searched both for the equipment he needed and the right words for Jennings. "Glass houses, Representative," Casey said. "You promised Fulcrum would stop its attacks on federal agents if I joined. Luring Larkin into a trap sounds an awful lot like an attack."

"You got your one last mission. We got ours."

"By my count, you got two. You attacked Agent Walker this morning."

"We reacquired Lizzie and Tommy last night. Once they told us Bartowski was the Intersect, we needed to move quickly."

"But you can see why I might think that you weren't holding up your end of the bargain," Casey said.

A throaty chuckle oozed from the phone. "Touché."

Casey shut the door and side-stepped to his right check out the next cabinet. He strained to shove aside a heavy box of ammunition. "Here's what we do," he said, maneuvering his head from side to side to see what was in the back of the cabinet. "We revert to the original terms of our deal. I finish my last mission for the NSA, I get you the file that you want, and then I'm Fulcrum. Everybody's happy."

"Unfortunately, the foundation of our plans assumed that Fulcrum had the Intersect. We cannot push ahead with them until we have Bartowski."

"Then I'd say you have a problem."

"Not us," Jennings said. "You. You will bring us the Intersect, Major Casey."

Casey froze, his search suddenly forgotten. Something was wrong. There was no threat in Jennings's voice. The man's tone was calm, assured, full of the smarmy self-confidence of a man who knew he was going to get what he wanted.

Despite the lack of light of the apartment, Casey's eyes narrowed into a squint. There was only one possible explanation.

"What was in the injection?" he asked.

"A particularly nasty cocktail that includes a slow-release poison."

Casey slowly stood up. An annoyed sound, part grunt, part growl, rolled out of the back of his throat. "Of course it does."

"The first twenty-four hours you won't feel much of anything, maybe a minor loss of appetite or a little muscle soreness," Jennings said. "During the second twenty-four hours, you can expect occasional bouts of dizziness and a gradual loss of muscular control."

"I'm guessing I really don't want to experience the third twenty-four hours."

"I knew you were a smart man." Jennings's smug grin was obvious even through the phone speaker. He was enjoying this, so much that, had he stood in front of Casey offering a choice between the antidote and wiping the grin off the man's face, Casey would have had to think about it. At least until he realized that he could take the antidote and then wipe the grin off the man's face.

Casey didn't care for being poisoned much.

"So I take it our original agreement is terminated," he said.

"More renegotiated than terminated. We still want you to come work for us."

"You've hardly laid the groundwork for a trusting partnership."

"The poison was originally meant to ensure you'd deliver the file as promised, but it should serve just as well to encourage you to deliver Bartowski," Jennings said.

"Or it just shortens the window I have to pay you back."

"Remember that it was your decision not to tell us about Bartowski. You'd be amazed just how many agent defections didn't turn out to be one-hundred percent genuine."

"Probably not."

"We're forced to be careful. Had you simply shared what you knew, your motives would never have come into question. These precautions wouldn't have been necessary."

" 'Precautions'?" A sharp, barking laugh escaped Casey's lips. "Since I agreed to join Fulcrum, I've been attacked, poisoned, and threatened with death if I don't complete a mission that breaks a fundamental tenet of our agreement."

"I'm sure you've realized that if the attack was designed to kill you, you'd already be dead. The poison is a precautionary. As soon as you complete your first mission and prove your loyalty, you get the antidote."

"And the last?" Casey's nostrils flared. "Fulcrum attacks on federal agents were supposed to stop."

"Unfortunately necessary. But Major, while I find the whole 'I'm not going to fight my former colleagues' thing very noble, you can drop the charade now. I don't think any less of you for joining Fulcrum for less than selfless reasons. In fact, I commend you for it."

Casey found himself wishing he was in the same room with Jennings so he could grab the man's lapels like the scruff of a dog's neck and give him a ferocious shake. He settled for a sneer and an energetic circuit of the apartment. "I will not go against Walker or Larkin or any other agent. These are honorable Americans that risk their lives every day in defense of our nation. They deserve better than to be taken down because they happen to inconvenience Fulcrum!"

"Don't get me wrong, I have little doubt that you've worked with some fine men and women, and I understand that it's not their fault the system is broken. But protecting them was not your first concern. It's not what brought you to Fulcrum."

"It was certainly part of it."

"Maybe a nice bonus, or even a way to salve a guilty conscience. It's not why you became Fulcrum. No, I'm guessing that when you saw Amafor, you started to remember the kind of missions that you used to go on with your old partner – the ones that really mattered, back when the NSA still kept sight of what was truly important. You know how good a man Amafor is, and that he wouldn't have switched sides without good reason.

"Then I'm guessing you thought about the conversations that you and I had, about how the government was ineffective at best and downright incompetent at worst, and you felt relieved that somebody finally would say what you and your colleagues, these noble Americans that you care so deeply about, all know in their hearts but would never dare speak aloud.

"For the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in your career, you allowed yourself to wonder if your superiors were capable of leading you as you deserve. You wondered why Beckman has kept you on such a short leash since Belarus, since a single mission went bad. Are you being punished? Or is the NSA simply incapable of functioning effectively?

"And then, the next morning, you woke up ready to take on the world – and realized that you were working undercover at a Buy More."

Casey pivoted and retraced his steps. An almost pathological need to defend Beckman welled up in his chest. "Keeping Bartowski at the Buy More isn't ideal, but it was an unusual situation. There was no real choice."

"See? That right there is what the government does to people. After a while, you develop a mindset where you believe that there aren't any good choices. There are always good choices. It's just that the CIA and the NSA and all the other agencies unintentionally function in such a way that good choices are never made. The red tape, the lack of interagency communication, the politics … little gets done, and on those rare occasions when the DoD manages to get its collective act together, it's a miracle if they do anything useful. You've come to the only conclusion that makes any sense – you work for an intelligence community incapable of doing what this country needs. That's why you came to Fulcrum, Casey. You just want to make a real difference again. There's nothing wrong with that."

Casey's steps ground to a halt. As pissed off as he was at how he'd been treated, there wasn't anything he could say to refute Jennings. If what he was saying wasn't the exact truth, it was damn close.

Jennings was in his element, stringing together words with uncanny speed and precision, striking at the heart of every doubt and complaint that Casey had about the NSA. Casey had no defense. Phone locked to his ear, he stood there helplessly as Jennings came in for the kill.

"You know all of this, Casey," Jennings said. "I see it in your eyes every time we talk. You're tired of huddling within our borders and playing defense, because you know that frees the enemies to keep attacking, and that eventually they'll break through. You want nothing more than to go after the people who would attack us and hit them where they live. But deep in your heart, you know that the NSA will never allow it, while Fulcrum will. We're going to do what Beckman has refused to do since Belarus, what she's unable or unwilling to do. We're going to put you in position to make a real difference."

An undeniable thrill ran through Casey as he relived the offer Jennings had made the previous night. Fulcrum had promised nothing less than his dream job – running black ops, without restrictions, without oversight. Mission planning would be his. Whatever intelligence and equipment he needed, he'd get. There was the minor detail that nobody would be coming in to rescue him if he got caught, but that really wasn't much different than at the NSA. Casey certainly had the scars to prove that.

No more baby-sitting assets. No more crappy cover stories. No more sitting around watching his skills erode and wondering what would be first to kill him – the boredom, or the inevitable day when somebody got the jump on him because his surroundings had dulled his instincts and lured him into complacency.

Even the choice of targets would be his call. He wasn't about to let Fulcrum use him to weed out people he knew, so veto power was a nonnegotiable condition for switching sides. Anticipating this, Jennings offered up a draft target list that comprised a who's who of America's biggest enemies, people Casey would gladly take out. Their absence from the world could only help America, no matter what Fulcrum's motivations were.

It was truly his dream job. If Casey could believe Fulcrum. If he could trust them. At the moment, their credibility was pretty much dead. Then again, he would be, too, if he didn't figure out a way out of this.

Because things had started off so badly, a big part of Casey wanted to tell Jennings that he'd seen the carrot-and-stick ruse before. Hell, Casey wanted to tell Jennings exactly where he could stick the carrot. He'd heard the stories of agents plied with sweet words and seductive promises designed to get them to complete a single mission or drop their guards for a fatal moment. Those stories rarely ended well.

But part of Casey desperately wanted to believe Jennings, to believe that Fulcrum still wanted Casey to do what he did best. What Jennings said made sense. Casey had held back the knowledge that Bartowski was the Intersect, and any number of men and women had been caught trying to be double agents. Fulcrum had no more reason to trust Casey than Casey had to trust them.

More than anything else, Casey wanted to protect his country, to go to sleep each night knowing that it was safer than the night before, that he was being used to his full abilities. How he made the country safer didn't really matter to him. He didn't care about medals or commendations. He didn't care what was written in his epitaph.

In the end, John Casey would do anything for his country. Even betray it.

He didn't need to decide right now. At the moment, the NSA and Fulcrum missions overlapped. Whether he decided to believe Jennings or not, Casey's only play was to find Bartowski.

He straightened his back and let the only words he felt safe saying, the only thing he knew for certain, slip through his lips.

"I'll find Bartowski."

* * *

The midday sun stalked Sarah into the courtyard. Her footsteps echoed off bricks and terracotta tiles until she scuffed to a halt outside the door to Ellie's apartment. She raised an arm to knock, but she hesitated, her fist upraised. She stood that way for a long moment, posed like some strange statue, a monument to her own self-doubt.

What was she going to do if this was a dead end? She had frighteningly few options left, and if Ellie didn't know something, she'd have no excuse to keep Graham from taking drastic action. He was already pinging her for updates every fifteen minutes and made no effort to keep his disapproval of the situation a secret.

Truth be told, Sarah was none too fond of the situation herself. With a forced breath, she let her arm drop and gathered herself. Standing around wasn't going to change anything. She straightened the girlish pink shirt she had hastily tossed on and rapped her knuckles on the hard door. Inside, Ellie's footsteps thumped closer over the noise of the television.

The door swung open, revealing Ellie in her usual cobalt blue scrubs. "Sarah, hi!" Ellie said, practically beaming at Sarah. That in itself told Sarah a lot – at least she hoped it did.

"Hi, Ellie," Sarah said with a forced smile. "Got a minute?"

"Of course. Come in, come in." The words and a come-hither curl of the fingers on one hand ushered Sarah into the apartment. Ellie shut the door. "Give me just a minute to tidy up." She bustled off towards the dining room, giving Sarah a chance to appraise the apartment with a practiced eye.

The sunlight continued to follow Sarah, streaming through the windows to explore warm tones and soft fabrics. The faint hints of some kind of cinnamon baked good lingered as if reluctant to leave. Several binders and a sheaf of papers covered the table, an island of clutter in a sea of tidiness Martha Stewart would have envied.

Ellie shoveled the papers and binders on the table into a stylish storage box at an alarming rate, almost as if embarrassed by their presence. "What are you up to?" Sarah asked, genuinely curious.

"Oh, just catching up on Project Runway." Ellie put the lid on the box. Her hands gripped the handles as if to move it, but Ellie paused before lifting it to give Sarah a penetrating look. "Of course, you know all about Project Runway, right?"

Sarah stiffened. She did know about Project Runway. It was a highly sensitive operation where she had set up a secure location for inserted agents to 'land' in Bucharest without attracting notice from the local authorities. She forced a cough to cover her surprise. "Ellie," she stammered, "how do you..."

She was interrupted by an announcer on the television. "Next week, on _Project Runway_…" Looking over at the television, she resisted a strong urge to smack herself. _Project Runway_ was some kind of reality show.

Ellie lifted the box off the table and set it on the kitchen counter. "How do I watch that stuff?" she said, finishing Sarah's sentence for her. "I don't know. Guilty pleasure, I guess." She flipped off the television with a flick of the remote and laughed her infectious laugh.

Sarah gladly joined in, realizing just how close she had come to blowing everything.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Ellie offered.

"No, thanks, I can't stay long."

"Oh, Sarah, we never get a chance to talk, at least not without my brother around. Stay for fifteen minutes."

In the back of her mind, Sarah heard a clock ticking. Still, her options for information were limited. It was pretty much down to Ellie. She had to find out what the woman knew, and if that meant sitting with her for a while, Sarah really didn't have much choice. "OK," she said. "But only fifteen minutes. I'll need to run after that."

Despite the circumstances, Ellie's smile made Sarah glad she'd decided to stay.

After Ellie made some tea, the two sat comfortably on the couch facing each other. Somehow, she had Sarah completely at ease within a few minutes. The two chatted about nothing in particular. Discussions about the weather, Sarah's woven hand bag, and Ellie's late night at the hospital quickly came and went.

"This is nice," Ellie said. "We need to do this more often."

Given the circumstances, Sarah was surprised to find herself agreeing. She had always felt a little uncomfortable around Ellie, expecting that if anyone were to see the truth of Chuck and Sarah's relationship, it would be the perceptive Ellie. "It is," Sarah said. "Things just get so crazy sometimes."

"Tell me about it. I hardly see Devon these days, let alone Chuck. How is he?" Ellie directed another penetrating gaze at Sarah, highlighting the question behind the question. Just two days ago, a lifetime ago, Ellie had openly questioned whether things were going well between Sarah and Chuck, and Sarah hadn't handled things particularly well. She had tried to lie to Ellie, and Ellie had caught the lie. A heartfelt apology had seemed to smooth things over, but Sarah couldn't be completely certain.

"Better. We talked about a couple of things yesterday. It helped." Sarah found herself frowning as she cradled her cup with both hands. "I think," she added.

Ellie's brow crinkled. "Is there a problem?"

"Just a misunderstanding. I think I can straighten it out." If I can find Chuck, she thought. If he wants to be found. Sighing softly, Sarah lowered the cup to her lap and reluctantly returned to the real reason she was there. "Ellie, do you know where Chuck is?"

The woman delayed her answer by taking a long, two-handed sip from her own cup, a thoughtful look coming across her features. "You don't know?"

"No. I thought things were going so well yesterday, but then he kind of vanished on me. He's not answering his phone, which isn't at all like him, and people at the Buy More say they haven't seen him in a few hours. Something doesn't feel right."

"Maybe he's got a surprise for you." Ellie suddenly refused to look at Sarah, fighting to keep the corner of her mouth from turning up.

Sarah's heart raced. Ellie knew something. For some reason, she was playing coy, but Chuck had told his sister something. "A surprise?" Sarah said. "Like what?"

Ellie's smile arrived in full. Her lips parted as if she was going to answer, but then pressed closed. "I can't. He'd kill me."

The woman was aching to share, but wouldn't break her brother's trust. It was up to Sarah to find a way to get that dam to burst.

She ran through the reasons that Ellie might be so excited for the two of them, and came up with two possibilities. One was some type of major relationship change, like moving in together or getting engaged. She dismissed those out-of-hand. It was one thing to tell a white lie to protect his sister and another to lie about the status of his relationship with Sarah. While Chuck had changed in many ways over the past few months, at his core he was still the same brother who hated lying to his sister.

Only one other thing might fill Ellie with this kind of excitement. "Does Chuck have a job interview?" Sarah asked.

Ellie's entire upper body quivered with bottled-up glee. With an almost pained expression, she said, "I can't help it. I'm so excited. Promise me you won't say anything to him."

Sarah leaned forward conspiratorially. "I promise."

"Chuck went to Seattle."

"Seattle?"

"Seattle."

A sickened feeling grew in her stomach. She ignored the sensation, distanced herself from it. "I don't get it. Why are you so excited about that?"

"One of Chuck's fraternity brothers made him a standing offer a few years back. Any time Chuck wanted a job with Microsoft, he could have one. Chuck never pursued it." Ellie paused, her eyes shining. "He must have finally decided to take him up on the offer."

"You're sure he has an interview? He told you this?"

"Well, no. But he left me a voice mail this morning saying he had bought a plane ticket to Seattle, and what other reason would my brother have for leaving town on a moment's notice?"

Sarah found herself wondering the same thing. She bit her lip.

Ellie studied Sarah's face. "What's wrong? I thought you'd be excited that Chuck is looking to leave the Buy More."

Sarah shifted uncomfortably. "It's just … strange, that's all. Chuck was telling me just yesterday how much he hates Seattle."

"Well, I guess we're willing to make sacrifices for the people we care about." The look Ellie gave left little doubt as to what she felt Chuck's inspiration had to be. Given the current circumstances, Sarah flushed more than blushed.

They both took a drink from their cups. Sarah used the tea as an excuse to glance away and try to figure out what this revelation could mean. Chuck had told her in no uncertain terms that he would never go to Seattle. Was this a message? Or was it just the perfect place for Chuck to run, the last place Sarah would look for him?

She still had no idea whether Chuck's trail led to him or away from him. The story told her little. Chuck could have told his sister the truth, trusting her not to reveal the secret to Sarah. It just as easily could be a cover story for Ellie's benefit, as the standing offer from Chuck's old friend clearly gave the story credibility in her eyes. Really, though, there was no way to know what it meant.

One last time, she scanned Ellie for any signs that the woman was stalling Sarah for Chuck's benefit. Once again, Sarah came up negative. That only made her feel guiltier about what she was doing, about how many times she had dealt with Ellie in a less than forthright manner – to put it charitably. Ellie deserved better.

The turning of the wheels in Sarah's head kept her from noticing Ellie's impatient stare. "So?" Ellie finally prompted.

Confused by the question, Sarah shook her head. "So what?"

"So would you go with Chuck if he takes the job?"

The smart thing to do would be to lie or deflect, but some reason, she couldn't make herself do that. Not to Ellie. Not to the woman who had treated her like a sister.

Not to the woman who seemed eager to have her as a sister.

Sarah's thoughts short-circuited. "Leave Burbank?" she said. "I don't know, Ellie." Strangely, she found herself considering the idea. She looked around the apartment, at the kitchen where Ellie cooked, at the table where Sarah had shared family meals, at the comfortable couches, at the cup of tea in her hands. She looked at the woman sitting across from her, gazing fondly at Sarah. Ghosts of memories past lurked in every inch of the place - games, holidays, laughter, fights. This was as close to a home as Sarah had ever had, and she truly hated the idea of walking out the door and never returning.

But while the strength of that reaction surprised her, what surprised her more was that she knew the answer to Ellie's question. Sarah would go with Chuck if the choice was hers. The problem was that it wasn't her choice. On multiple levels.

Her cell phone rang, thankfully saving her from having to come up with an answer. She rummaged through her bag and pulled out her phone to find Casey's grim visage staring back at her. "I'm sorry," Sarah said, fully meaning it. "I really need to take this."

The corners of Ellie's eyes drooped, but she covered it well with an understanding smile. Sarah set her mostly empty cup on the coffee table with an apologetic nod and walked towards the front door. She hesitated a bit before answering, partially to give Ellie a chance to collect the cups and head to the kitchen, partially in case she didn't like what Casey had to say.

When Sarah could put it off no longer, she answered. "Walker here."

"Where are you?"

"Ellie's apartment."

"Get over to my place. I know where Bartowski is."

Splinters of ice coursed up her back. Casey had found Chuck first. She had been desperately clinging to the hope that Chuck still believed in her and had left her a way to find him, but either Sarah had failed to solve Chuck's riddle in time, or there had never been a riddle to solve.

Minutes later, Sarah was carefully steering through Casey's dark apartment, navigating the maze of equipment cases littering the floor. A small forest of bonsai trees sat perched seemingly wherever there was flat space available, somehow surviving in what little light slipped in through the cracks in the shuttered blinds, their tiny budded tops looking like moss clinging to ledges in a dank cave.

She managed to navigate to the center of the living room and towards the kitchen without incident. Casey faced her direction, occupied with equipment housed in a metal suitcase on the kitchen counter. Without looking up, he said, "I assume Davis was a dead end."

She took the last few steps to her side of the counter and adopted an uncertain stance, hands on the countertop and one foot perched behind the rest of her on its toes. "Chuck has me running all over town. Davis sent me to Morgan who sent me to Ellie."

"And what does Ellie know?"

"She got a voice mail from Chuck saying he caught a flight this morning."

"Any ideas on the destination?"

"Seattle, but I don't think–"

"Good, that matches what I know."

She kept her tone as neutral as she could, with only moderate success. "What did you find?"

He smirked, his eyes mirthful at her discomfiture. "Still surprised that our boy could up and leave without a proper goodbye?"

"Casey, what did you find?"

He circled the counter, extracting several sheets of paper from a manila folder along the way. "If Bartowski is going to get very far, he needs money, right?"

"Obviously."

"There's still no activity on his credit card or bank card, and no unusual activity in any of his friends' accounts either. However, he had one other place he could get cash."

"What's that?"

" You remember the 'insurance payout' we gave Ellie?"

She nodded. Of course she remembered. When Chuck had totaled Ellie's car in the ravine, there had been no way to replace the car without Ellie suspecting, so the government had engineered a story about a hit-and-run and a wealthy client willing to pay to keep the story off the front pages. It had been the DoD's way of providing Chuck a long overdue paycheck, one that he was happy to pass along to his sister.

Casey said, "Ellie stopped by the lawyer's office first thing yesterday morning to collect the payout. She had two checks cut. The first was in her name and contained the bulk of the money. The second was made out to Bartowski to the tune of five thousand dollars."

"Ellie said she wanted to share the money with him."

"Well, he cashed the check this morning at the Large Mart. Paid fifty dollars for the privilege. Idiot probably thinks it's hilarious he's escaping on the government's dime."

"That last part really doesn't seem like Chuck's style." She pursed her lips in thought. "So we know he has a lot of cash. What's his next move?"

"I know where he used some of it."

"Where?"

"Like Ellie said, he caught a plane."

"To Seattle?"

He handed her a sheet of paper. "At 1118 this morning, Charles Irving Bartowski purchased a one-way ticket for flight 1634 to Seattle at the LAX ticket counter. He paid cash." He handed her a second sheet. "Flight manifest confirms he boarded."

Sarah numbly took the printouts. The news was like a fist tightening around her stomach, threatening to squeeze its contents up her throat. Chuck really was going to Seattle. He had told his sister the truth, and had gone to the last place Sarah would look for him.

"Plane's already on the ground," Casey said.

Sarah looked at the flight information and the clock. After some quick math, her stomach calmed slightly. "There's no way he could be in Seattle so quickly."

"The flight makes one stop. In San Francisco."

After she processed the information and his tone, Sarah decided they were thinking along the same lines. "You think he's going to Stanford."

"Don't you?"

"It would make some sense. Stanford is friendly turf. His ID card is still active, so he has access to all the buildings. But isn't that kind of an obvious move? What if he really is going to Seattle?"

"Well, we'll know soon enough."

"How's that?"

Casey looked down on her with a triumphant smirk. "Because I planted a tracking device in his watch."

* * *

_Sorry this took so long, but honestly, this was one of the hardest chapters I've ever written. The first Casey section was so difficult to get right. I'm not exaggerating when I say I went through at least a dozen re-writes. Please let me know what you think._

_Thanks to Baylink for his feedback early on. I wish I had the patience to send the last version back to him, as he probably would have trouble recognizing it, but for now, I just need to move on to the rest of the story._


	9. Fight or Flight

Casey's words hovered in the air. "Because I planted a tracking device in his watch."

Sarah's jaw dropped. Her body tensed. Shock and surprise consumed her.

It was a brilliant performance. And since Casey's smirk somehow managed to become even more obnoxious, clearly he had bought the act hook, line and sinker.

Sarah had known about the device in the watch since New Year's Eve. Graham had informed her of what Beckman would order Casey to do if the new version of the Intersect came online, so she had been on the lookout for any preparations Casey might be making. She had found the device on a routine sweep of Chuck's things while he was in the shower.

If she had removed it or confronted Casey, she would have tipped off Casey that she knew what was going on. She also would have needed to watch more vigilantly for whatever he used to replace the device. Leaving it alone had kept Casey in the dark and left her with fewer worries.

Keeping the device in place had been a smart move. Not telling Chuck about it – that was a different story.

When she first told him about the watch, Sarah promised that it was just a cover gift and that there were no spy devices inside. A previous gift, a phony picture of the two of them with a bug hidden in the frame, had been a debacle, so she wasn't about to plant another device in a gift. But once Casey made his move, she was stuck. She couldn't tell Chuck about device, because he would have asked why she had searched the watch in the first place. How could she tell him that Casey was making preparations to incarcerate Chuck – or worse – if the Intersect was successfully rebuilt?

Then Chuck would have asked Sarah what she would do if given the same orders. Back then, Chuck wouldn't have understood her answer. She would do what she could for him, but at the end of the day, the job still came first. Net result: Chuck would no longer have trusted Casey or her. That wasn't an option.

The mistake had been not telling Chuck about the device later, after he was almost extracted from the rooftop by Longshore, after she came back from South America to be with him. Given how their relationship had progressed since then, Chuck would have understood. This all could have been avoided if she had just told him.

The metal of the heart-shaped pendant of her necklace burned cold against her skin. Her necklace, like the watch, had been a cover Christmas gift. Both had been simple little trinkets when they were unwrapped at Ellie's. Now the watch held Casey's device, and the necklace held a secret of its own. Inside the necklace pendant, on the back of the picture of Chuck and Sarah, Chuck had scribbled three words. "I trust you."

In retrospect, she hadn't repaid Chuck's trust particularly well. She kept demanding his trust, yet she hadn't fully trusted him. It was a mistake that she had made time and again. And now he was running because she hadn't trusted in him.

Casey stood in front of her, lording his victory over her. All the emotion that Sarah had carried since finding out why Chuck had left came rushing back to the surface. She wanted to lash out at Casey, to rub his smug nose in the fact that she had known about his device and that the reason Chuck was only running because of the damn thing. But the truth was that she was angry with herself. It was her fault Chuck was gone.

She either trusted Chuck or she didn't. She either was worthy of his trust, or she wasn't. All she wanted now was to find Chuck, to protect him, to be given one more chance to show him that she deserved the trust he had given her. And for those reasons, she had to play along – for now.

Luckily, she had a convenient outlet for all that emotion. Casey would expect surprise and anger. Her surprise would be feigned, but her anger, well, anger he would get in spades.

"Casey!" she practically screamed. "You planted a device without telling me? When?"

"Back around Christmas, while you two were having dinner with Shawn Liniman."

"Two months ago?"

"Don't get all indignant on me. After Christmas we lost Chuck for three hours because you didn't put a tracker in the watch like you should have. So I had to do it. Looks like a pretty shrewd move now."

"It would have been a shrewd move if you had pulled out the tracker two hours ago."

"We had a credible lead on Bartowski's location."

"And you didn't want to tell me about the watch until you had no choice."

Instead of answering, Casey spun the case on the counter around. The screen displayed a decent rendition of a map, centered on Los Angeles. State borders were drawn with white lines. Cities were labeled in blue and marked with filled squares, the size of each square representing the city's population. Thin yellow lines snaked between the cities, marking major highway routes. A green blinking dot, flashing a good distance up the coast of California, must have represented the location of the watch. Casey grunted and gave the blinking dot a hard tap with a finger, as if trying to squish an insect crawling across the screen. "There's our boy."

Sarah's focus dropped down to the console. At the right end of a row of knobs and switches above the keyboard, she found what she was looking for, a red button with a plastic shield covering it. She shuddered.

As soon as she had found the device, she had researched it. Learning the basics about the device had been trivial. She was not entirely surprised to discover the device was not only a tracker, but had the capability to kill Chuck. Given what Beckman might order, it was a logical maneuver for Casey.

A little more research had determined something else. The chip was designed to funnel electric current from the battery via eight leads mounted to a metallic watch case. She found a mission report where a CIA agent had severed two of the leads, reducing the amount of current delivered. By cutting two of the leads, the agent had successfully neutralized a target rather than killing him. Sarah had severed the same two leads to ensure the device would only stun Chuck into unconsciousness if activated.

In a way, the device had played into her hands. Her modifications wouldn't trigger a console alert that the device had failed, which would have given Sarah a window of opportunity to react before Casey realized Chuck wasn't dead. But that didn't mean that she liked keeping secrets from Chuck, and she certainly didn't like Casey keeping secrets from her.

The device had caused her a fair bit of heartache, and she finally had her chance to vent some frustration. In an ominously quiet voice, she said, "Casey, is that a kill switch?"

Casey's answer was a slam of the lid of the case.

"Answer me, Casey."

He refused to look at her. Instead, he slowly and deliberately fastened the two black plastic latches shut.

"Damnit, don't you think I should have known about this?"

Burning eyes met her own. "And what? Told you that I had made contingency plans to kill Bartowski? Yeah, that conversation would have gone over well."

"We're not supposed to keep secrets from each other."

"Really." He folded his arms. "Anything you want to tell me about the status of your relationship with Bartowski?"

To her credit, Sarah didn't look away, but at the same time she found she couldn't speak. He was right. He wasn't the only one keeping secrets from his partner.

"That's what I thought," he said.

Somehow Casey didn't seem as judgmental as she would have expected. If she didn't know better, she would have said his tone was slightly sad.

He grabbed the case from the counter and walked into the living room. "We'll know soon enough if Chuck's getting off in San Francisco," he said. "Seattle or Stanford, either way, I'll find him."

Sarah's mind whirled. She came to quick decision and chased after him. "So," she said, "when do we leave?"

He lifted an enormous black duffel bag onto the recliner. "We? NSA will handle this."

Her eyes grew steely. "I'm coming with you."

Casey unzipped the duffel, picked up his jacket from the chair and stuffed it into the bag. "No, you're not."

"Casey–"

"This isn't a debate. You know why you need to stay put."

"I'm coming."

He shot her a warning glance. "Don't make me go to Beckman with this."

She froze. His suspicions might not be enough to keep her from coming, but she couldn't take that risk. And he knew it.

He took one last look around the room for anything he might have missed and zippered the bag shut. "Monitor communications from here in case our hero contacts Grimes or his sister. I'm guessing that I can handle Bartowski, but Beckman insisted that I take two agents as back-up." He watched her as he slung the bag over his shoulder and grabbed the suitcase in his off hand.

"And if one of those agents turns out to be Fulcrum?"

His eyes swung away for the briefest of instants. "They aren't."

Sarah frowned. How could he possibly know that?

She never got a chance to ask. He said, "We should be on the ground in San Fran about 1430. I'll keep you posted." He turned and headed for the door.

Her eyes followed him as he went, assessing, looking for clues about what he wasn't saying. Casey's raised shoulders signaled that there was plenty, but he wasn't exactly forthcoming under normal circumstances. And these were hardly normal circumstances.

As he reached for the knob on his front door, he hesitated. Without turning around, he said, "Walker?"

"Yes?"

"Be careful."

Without another word, he opened the door and left.

After the door shut, she exhaled sharply. Plenty about the way Casey left bothered her, but for the moment she filed it all away. Their encounter had verified what she needed to know for the time being – she needed to find Chuck before Casey did.

Her calculated gamble to volunteer to join him had paid off. Casey obviously didn't want her along. Normally, that would be concerning, but right now it played into her hands.

She didn't want to go with Casey because he was wrong.

Chuck knew about the tracking device in the watch. That left two possible explanations for the watch following the same path as the plane flight. Either Chuck was trying to lure the agents to Seattle or San Francisco, or it was all an elaborate false trail.

Setting up a false trail was smart. Ticking off Casey by sending him on a wild goose chase and then deliberately luring him towards you was reckless, if not downright stupid. 'Reckless' and 'stupid' were two words not often used to describe Chuck Bartowski.

Chuck would expect the agents to hone in on the watch, so wherever the watch went was the last place the agents should go. Still, she had a problem. If the watch did end up leading Casey to Stanford, Sarah couldn't fully rule out Seattle as a destination.

Something else clicked. According to Ellie, Chuck's voice mail said that he had bought a plane ticket to Seattle, not that he was going to Seattle. Sarah smiled a fond smile. Chuck still couldn't bear to lie to his sister. He had told Ellie that he was buying the plane ticket, but not that he was planning on using it himself.

Sarah was betting hard that this was some type of decoy. She walked across the room to stare at an old black-and-white surveillance photograph mounted on the wall. In the picture Chuck was at the Buy More, a Nerd Herd desk phone pinned between his shoulder and an ear while pointing something out to a grey-haired woman. She folded her arms as she tried to put herself in his shoes. "Where are you really, Chuck? And who the hell is sitting in your seat on the Seattle flight?"

* * *

Jeff Barnes sat in the window seat of the bulkhead row of the plane, sipping a vodka on the rocks and so close to first class he could almost smell it. He leaned back in his reclined seat. "Living the good life," he said to himself with a contented grin.

The layover in San Francisco was about half complete. A fair number of passengers had disembarked, and now new passengers were starting to board. It wasn't long before a woman took the seat next to him. She was a college student by the looks of it, with stringy orangish-blond hair and a nondescript face, the type of woman you'd never look at twice. That is, unless you were Jeff. He didn't discriminate on race, creed, or personal grooming habits. He was an equal opportunity lover – a pulse equaled an opportunity.

Besides, she popped some kind of pill into her mouth as she sat, and a woman taking drugs always held promise.

"Is that anything interesting?" he asked as an icebreaker.

"Air sickness," she said. A corner of her mouth twisted upwards as if there was some kind of inside joke he was missing. "You're Jeff?"

"That would make you Glenda." he said.

"Would it?"

Something Chuck said came back to Jeff. "Oh, right. I'm supposed to say something. What was it?" He wracked his brain for a moment. "Ah. 'Are you coming to the toga party?' "

Unusually sharp eyes looked him over. "Really. You're an agent?" Her lips pursed in irritation, as if she'd committed some cardinal sin.

"I'm whatever you want me to be." His lips pursed into a little kissing motion.

Glenda looked like she might throw up. "Just … give me the package."

Jeff awkwardly straightened his body by pushing up on his heels, levering his shoulders against the backrest. He fished Chuck's watch out of his pants pocket and carelessly dangled it towards her. "Be careful with that," she hissed. She removed an orange and black dress scarf from her purse and had him place the watch directly in the fabric. The scarf-covered watch disappeared into her purse.

It took Jeff a moment to realize why she reacted so strongly. "Oh, right. Sorry." Chuck's uncle had died, and the watch was some kind of family heirloom, but Chuck had to fly back east to help with an aunt's funeral.

He never realized Chuck had so much family.

Since Chuck couldn't deliver the watch himself and his cousin was boarding the flight in San Francisco, Chuck had offered to fly Jeff to Seattle in exchange for making the delivery. Sure, the trip was short notice, but it gave Jeff an unexpected chance to visit his mother, a prisoner in the Washington State Department of Corrections. He hadn't seen Mom in a long time. A nice card and a special gift would be appropriate, he mused. Like a carton of cigarettes to use as currency on the inside. Or maybe something to make her feel pretty, like an unbreakable comb she could also fashion into a shiv. He liked the last idea. Multipurpose and thoughtful.

He turned to regard Glenda again. Having lost two relatives so close together, she was no doubt very upset. Very vulnerable. Her standards would be low. That made her very much his kind of woman.

She caught him regarding her and somehow managed to look more nauseous. Jeff pounced. He twisted to face her and spoke in a deep, seductive voice. "I get it. With everything that's happened, you're feeling lower than low. But spend five to seven minutes with me in the lavatory, and I guarantee you won't remember how low you used to feel."

With a deft motion, the woman snatched a barf bag from the pouch mounted on the bulkhead wall and vomited noisily.

Jeff leaned back. "Damn. That's never happened before."

The woman's chest heaved again, and once or twice more for good measure.

"I mean, plenty of women have told me that I've made them want to throw up, but none of them have ever _actually_ thrown up."

A steward appeared in the aisle. He leaned over the pitiful Glenda, bracing himself against the headrest of the seat. "Miss, are you OK?"

Chuck's cousin looked up from her bent-over position and weakly shook her head. "I don't think so."

"You shouldn't fly. Let's get you off the plane."

The steward helped Chuck's cousin to her feet. Given her condition, Glenda shot Jeff a surprisingly lucid look and nodded. Then she hunched over and allowed herself to be guided up the aisle towards the front of the plane.

Jeff processed this turn of events with a dull disinterest, until he realized that while he might have lost a chance at love, he had gained an empty seat next to him for the second leg of his flight. His eyes grew wide with excitement. Life may taketh away, but it giveth right back.

He pulled up the arm separating the two seats and twisted his body so he could stretch out. He took another sip of his drink and let out a satisfied sigh. "Living the good life," he said to nobody in particular.

* * *

Chuck hadn't flown very often, and he didn't have fond recollections of the few times he had. His last flight had been for an academic competition in high school, and his memories of the trip stood out more for the turbulence, the air sickness and the mocking stares of his classmates than for any particular enjoyment of the experience.

This time around was little better. Sure, the turbulence had been minimal and none of his classmates were on this flight, but even a double-dose of Dramamine couldn't kill the queasiness in his stomach. After all, a pressurized tube at 35,000 feet was fairly easy to track, and if his ploys to throw his pursuers off his track failed, either the plane would make a quick U-turn or Chuck would be greeted by some very unfriendly faces at his destination.

Despite his best efforts, he couldn't stifle a yawn. He'd been unable to sleep the previous night, so he had been going for thirty-plus hours straight. Fatigue and anxiety were starting to wear on him. Adrenalin had pretty much carried him to the plane, but now that all he could do was sit and wait, his body kept insisting it needed to shut down. Unfortunately, the constant stress of the chase short-circuited that message, as only his legs had any luck falling asleep. He squirmed in his seat, trying to generate some circulation and relieve the pinpricks.

His seating situation wasn't improving his comfort level. He had waited until the last possible moment to board, and since the airline used cattle-car style boarding, the only open seat was a middle seat three rows from the back. To his left, an obese gentleman spilled over the shared armrest, his hands clasped across his expansive gut as he dozed. To his right, a red-bearded man in a handmade wool pullover found a different way to violate Chuck's airspace, having successfully dodged any encounters with soap for some time now. Chuck reached up and tried twisting the overhead fan nozzle again, hoping to coax a little more fresh air into his face.

Despite the discomfort, Chuck was just happy that he'd made it this far. Luckily, Jeff hadn't noticed or hadn't cared when Chuck bought their tickets to the opposite destinations and then switched the tickets once they got past security. All Jeff had cared about was the free flight, so once he'd heard Chuck's offer, Jeff only delayed Chuck long enough to grab a disturbingly well-packed bag from his stalkermobile and ditch a few items that the TSA wouldn't have looked kindly upon. All the deception had cost was the price of the plane fare and the lies – the money and another small piece of Chuck's soul.

"Plane ticket? $300," he said to himself. "Another plane ticket? $425. Escaping your government handlers? Priceless."

The muttered words were enough to disturb the Incredible Bulk. "Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?" he said without opening his eyes.

"Sorry, sir." Chuck glanced at his other row-mate to see if he might have overheard, but while the nappy-haired man was granola enough to skip showers, apparently using an iPod didn't violate his complicated personal philosophies. Chuck went back to his thoughts.

The money was worth it. With Jeff sitting in Chuck's seat on the plane to Seattle, the airline's records would have the correct passenger count all the way to Seattle. A successful hand-off of the watch to the Stanford-student-slash-CIA-agent would leave two false trails to follow. The only real risk was if Casey or Sarah decided to call the FAA and stop Jeff's flight, because then Jeff would be thrust into a mess and the agents might figure out Chuck was traveling on Jeff's ticket. But even if his handlers found out quickly enough to make that happen, Chuck didn't think they would risk creating a major scene by getting federal authorities involved. Fulcrum agents seemed to have ears everywhere. Casey and Sarah would want to handle this themselves.

He could only hope that his initial lead and network of false trails would be enough to keep him at least one step ahead of everybody. Relying on the airlines was a major gamble, but it was the only way he knew to quickly put significant distance between himself and Los Angeles. Chuck just hoped his gambit was more gutsy than stupid. He wouldn't know for certain until the plane landed. He sighed, drawing an angrily opened eye from his neighbor.

Chuck decided that there was no sense in worrying about a welcoming party now. If they had him, they had him – and if they didn't, he had a decision to make.

Ever since he had learned about the device in the watch, Chuck had been preparing to leave, with an eye towards protecting his friends and family as best he could. The various false trails and misdirections had been carefully scripted to get himself and anyone searching for him well away from Burbank and Echo Park. The plan to fly increased his risk of getting caught, but that risk was more than balanced because he was leading the danger away. He could leave a trail to another town and go off-grid from there.

However, the strange phone call that morning had cast his plans into doubt. What if he was the only one who had a shot at stopping Fulcrum? He couldn't trust the motivations of the person placing the call, not without knowing who he was, but if there was one thing he had learned from six months in the spy world – and sixteen years of hard-core comic book reading – it was that the best lies were laced with a strong dose of the truth.

What the mystery person had said made sense, plus the new version of the Intersect had to be either operational or close to operational, or there wouldn't be a device planted in the watch in preparation for permanently shutting down the old version. By uploading the new Intersect, Chuck might become an interface to join the two data sets. An Intersect of Intersects.

Then again, the new version of the Intersect could simply overwrite the old one, or prove somehow incompatible and cause him permanent mental problems. No need to borrow trouble, though. He already had plenty on layaway.

Even though he still had a ways to go, his escape plan seemed to be working. Once he reached the termination point – hopefully not an ironic choice of words – he could conceivably go after the new Intersect. He had been planning on disappearing, but he could also try to stop Fulcrum and give himself a shot at getting his life back.

So what to choose? "Fight or flight?" he mused.

"There's going to be a fight on this flight if you don't shut up," the Bulk said.

"Sorry." Irritation at the man's sensitivity surged through Chuck. He ran a tired hand over his face and tried to refocus.

Running was the smart thing to do. Given a lead over his pursuit, Chuck should be able to find a place to hide. The roughly four thousand dollars in his pocket would be enough to get started in some quiet little town where he could pick up work without anyone asking too many questions.

He could even chance slipping across the border. He had two sets of false identification credentials left over from previous missions, along with some credentials provided by the mysterious voice on the phone, but either could be tracked by people he couldn't necessarily trust. However, once outside the borders of the United States, he would be damn hard to find, so it was tempting.

Still, hiding meant a lifetime on the run. Eventually, somebody would catch up to him. Until then, he'd live each day in fear, needing to exercise caution in every move he made. He would never contact his family or friends again. He couldn't afford to make new friends. That was no way for anybody to live.

There was a third option, he mused. He could turn himself in and hope for the best. Maybe Beckman or Graham would let him upload the new version and see if he could link the Intersects. That would accomplish the same thing as going after the new Intersect himself, with a much better chance of success. Besides, he'd accomplished a primary goal when he lured everyone away from his loved ones, so what was the down side?

He knew the answer – a not-so-comfortable room in a bunker while Fulcrum was laughing their way past the so-called government security. Tommy's escape had shown how much government security was worth where Fulcrum was involved. Chuck's life would become the equivalent of sitting in an empty waiting room until Fulcrum seized the opportunity to take care of him. He could almost hear a female attendant's voice. _"The Fulcrum agent will see you now." -bang-_

He giggled at the ridiculous thought, causing the Bulk to tense.

No, that wasn't a possibility. Even if Beckman and Graham agreed to it, all it did was simplify Fulcrum's job. He only had the two options.

His wandering thoughts were interrupted by a staticky voice on the plane's intercom. "This is your captain speaking to you from the flight deck," a deep voice said. "Wanted to let everyone know that we've got clear skies in front of us, so we should be landing in about an hour. So sit back, relax, and if there is anything we can do make the rest of your flight more enjoyable, please don't hesitate to contact a member of our crew."

A derisive laugh caught in Chuck's throat. The flight attendants probably weren't given much training on breaking into government facilities or in aiding and abetting a government asset fleeing his handlers. "Thanks anyway."

This time, the Bulk stirred. He turned like any massive mammal turned – slowly and with purpose. "You do realize that you're taking your life in your hands."

That was more than enough. Chuck's last comment had barely been a whisper. It was ludricrous for seat 28D to be throwing his considerable weight around over any of this.

Chuck twisted to meet the intense glare with one of his own, countering gruff annoyance with icy calm. He leaned in close as he could so only his touchy neighbor would hear.

"As a matter of fact, I do know I'm taking my life into my hands. You see, people are after me. Dangerous people. Deadly people. A pissed-off ex-Marine. A girlfriend who may have orders to kill me. An entire faction dedicated to betraying their own government for some purpose I cannot begin to fathom. I didn't hurt any of these people. I didn't break any laws. I didn't ask for this. But they want me, and if they catch me, it will not end well for me. I am sorry that you're losing a couple hours of low-quality sleep, but since I have a few bigger things going on, maybe you can see your way clear to cut me a little slack. What do you say?"

As the rant concluded, the Bulk looked far less sure himself. "If any of that is true, why would you tell me?"

"Mainly because I'm tired. Not just physically tired, which I am, but tired of so many other things. I'm tired of being afraid. I'm tired of living a lie." An important truth came to Chuck. "I'm tired of hiding, even when I get to hide inside my own life, because when I don't get to make any choices that matter, it's no longer my life. It hasn't really been my life for a long time now. So I choose to tell you because I'm tired, and I want somebody to understand what I'm going through."

"But I could turn you in."

"I suppose you could try. But who would believe you? Besides, then you'd be involved, and trust me when I say that the people after me have a passion for tying up loose ends."

"You threatening me?"

Chuck laughed, which only disconcerted the other man more. "I'm not threatening you; I'm warning you. You do not want to get involved with this. I don't want to be involved with this. I just want it all to be over."

The man's eyes widened as he saw … something … in Chuck's eyes. Maybe he saw the naked honesty. Maybe he saw the fear. Who knows, maybe he saw nervous exhaustion from someone incapable of recognizing just how close to the edge he really was. Chuck didn't know what the other man saw, but whatever he saw convinced the man to believe Chuck. "Good luck, buddy," the man said softly. "For some reason, I think you're going to need it."

He turned to face the other way, leaving Chuck in peace.

Chuck was left to marvel at his cathartic little outburst. Not only had it released some pent-up emotion, but it had highlighted what he needed to do. He didn't want a life. He wanted _his_ life. And if there was a way, Chuck was going to fight to make it happen.

The next hour was a blur of dread and empowerment and fear and freedom. His laptop took a serious pounding. Chuck would type and type and type and then delete everything he'd just written en masse, laughing maniacally at the notion he could ever come up with a plan that would work. He mumbled to himself as he worked, cocking his head to one side as he considered something or shaking his head at the insanity of what he just proposed. The Bulk never stirred.

At times Chuck felt like his head might explode. Freak-outs were common. What the hell was he thinking? This kind of mission had nearly killed Bryce, and Chuck had no formal spy training. In those moments of doubt, he forced himself to remember why he was doing this. The status quo with Casey and Sarah had ended, and if it was going to end, it was going to end on his terms, damnit. And as soon as he felt slightly calmer, he'd put his head down and go back to work.

When the wheels touched down, he was scribbling notes into a wire-bound notebook on his lap, having been forced by aviation rules to shut down his computer and stow his tray table fifteen minutes earlier. Crumpled up pieces of paper littered the floor beneath him, trash he'd need to collect and ensure got discarded somewhere nobody would ever read them. But as he regarded the top sheet of paper in the notebook, he smiled.

It might have been the sleep deprivation talking, but the plan outlined on the sheet seemed feasible. If a few of his guesses were correct. If he caught a few breaks. If he could convince a few people to help him. If everything went perfectly.

Yeah, it was probably the sleep deprivation talking. But good plan or not, he was going to stop running. He was going rogue. He was going to get his life back.

Chuck was going after the Intersect.

* * *

_Thanks to Baylink, who did his usual good work. This story wouldn't be what it is without him._

_For this chapter, though, special thanks are reserved to MySoapBox, who did a fantastic beta that really nailed a number of things. She'll recognize that I outright stole a fair bit of something she shared because it was so real and genuine that I couldn't resist. It seemed an appropriate tribute given the stamp she helped to put on this chapter, so hopefully she doesn't mind too much._

_All mistakes are my own._


	10. Lengthening the Lead

_Author's note: I'm back. Again._

_Given that an update is long overdue, to say the least, I thought it only fair to tell you where I am with things._

_I have several chapters pretty much ready to go. This would take us to the end of part one, and to a place where it would be more satisfying to leave off in case I need to take another break. __I plan on posting these chapters every 3-4 days over the next two weeks. At that point, I'll give a heads up on where I stand._

_As a bit of an apology, I'm posting two chapters right away. Sorry for the long absence, but as much as I would enjoy writing these stories full-time, it just doesn't work that way..._

_Enjoy!_

* * *

Something didn't feel right.

Maybe it was something as simple as being out of his element. The Stanford campus was like a movie set, with everything seeming a bit too perfect. Flawless stone-faced buildings with red tile roofs surrounded courtyards and beautifully manicured lawns. Idyllic quads were clogged by a morass of students straight out of Central Casting – well-coiffed Greeks, unkempt bookworms, and activists pitching causes to anyone who would listen.

Casey stood out from the crowd as much because of his utilitarian black outfit as the stern look of disapproval on his face. This was where the future leaders of America were groomed? Here, fighting for your beliefs meant petitions and picket lines. Saving the world meant depositing plastic water bottles in the correct recycling bin. This was no preparation for the real world. At least, not the world Casey lived in.

Unfortunately, Casey suspected the knot in his gut wasn't disgust at the denizens of this bleeding-heart factory. No, he and his teammate were closing in on the watch's signal, but according to the campus map, only the only possible destination ahead was the Stanford Oval, a large egg-shaped park surrounded by a one-way road and some diagonally parked cars. That made no sense. Bartowski should be cowering in a computer lab or a library, not basking in the warm afternoon sun.

Casey and an accompanying NSA agent passed between yet another pair of the stone-faced buildings, walked a few dozen paces and stopped at the top of three concrete steps. Across the road was the squatter end of the Oval, all grass and sidewalks and college students. Frisbees, volleyballs and carefree laughter filled the air. The signal tracked dead ahead.

Definitely not promising. Casey pulled out a pair of high-tech binoculars. The autofocus whirred as he scanned the park. A cloud passed overhead, casting a shadow over everything.

"Sir?" one of the other agents said.

Casey lowered the binoculars and turned to regard Agent Thornton. He was a young man, new enough to the agency that he hadn't figured out that his goatee made him too easy to pick out of a crowd. Casey resisted the temptation to haul out his hunting knife and field-shave the man's chin. "What?"

"What's the accuracy on this thing?"

He glanced back at the portable version of the watch tracker, currently held by Thornton. The damned thing was attracting even more attention than their outfits. Once again, Casey found himself scowling at passing students, convincing them to stifle their curiosity and keep moving. "Fifteen, maybe twenty yards."

"So that means the watch is in the middle of the park. Why would Bartowski hang out in a crowd of college students if he knows he's being chased?"

A little slower than Casey's thought process, but not bad for a rook. "I don't think he would."

"So what does it mean?"

"Go with the obvious. There could be a malfunction with the system, but more likely the watch is here but Bartowski isn't. One way to find out."

He headed for the Oval, the other agent in tow. Steps, sidewalk, street, and they found themselves surrounded by students. Some studied, some played sports, some just sat and talked. He couldn't see Bartowski. The knot in his gut grew.

Casey had Thornton check the monitor one last time. The signal tracked to somewhere up ahead to his right. What had Bartowski done? Buried the watch? Casey's eyes skimmed the crowd and the ground, looking for some hint, some clue. He got it a moment later when a familiar-looking girl locked eyes with his.

She was reclining on the grass, off by herself, relatively speaking. She was strikingly unremarkable except for a mop of stringy orange hair. One arm was cocked to the side, holding a book open with a thumb. The watch sat in plain view on a black and orange scarf to her side.

"I think you're the guy I've been waiting for," she said.

He scanned the park to further assess the situation. "I'm flattered, but you're a little young for me."

"I thought you'd be harder to spot. What's your cover supposed to be? Death?"

Bartowski had made a similar joke on his previous visit. He decided Stanford must teach humor as an elective. Clearly they needed a new professor.

He frowned. "I know you from somewhere."

"Yes, you do. I saved your ass in a physics classroom a while back."

Casey wanted to groan. Bartowski had recruited the Stanford CIA recruits. "Where's Bartowski?"

"I don't know."

"And I don't have time for games."

"I have no idea where he is."

"Then how'd you get the watch?"

She squinted as the sun emerged from behind a cloud. "Some strange frizzy-haired dude gave it to me."

"Barnes," Casey grumbled under his breath. That explained a number of things. It also meant that she likely was telling the truth about not knowing where Bartowski was. At least the last of Bartowski's idiot accomplices was now accounted for. "I'll be taking the watch."

"My orders are to keep it."

"It's NSA property."

"So? I'm CIA."

"Not if you don't live to join."

She laughed a genuine laugh. Casey was impressed, but only slightly. She might just be too naive to be scared.

He asked, "You don't think I would kill you?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"If the watch were worth killing over, nobody would entrust it to a recruit. I certainly wouldn't have orders to let you find me."

"Not a bad assessment. However, sometimes things change."

"Which is why I didn't come alone."

He didn't need to glance around stupidly; his entourage took care of that for him. Without taking his eyes off the girl, Casey said, "Red hat, swim suit, tau omega, flat tire."

"What is that? Some kind of code?"

"Your team. Number one is sitting about fifteen yards behind you, wearing a red hat and barely pretending to be interested in his textbook. Number two is off to my right, face down on a beach towel, about to get a terrible crick in her neck because she can't lie naturally and watch us at the same time. The guy in the Tau Omega T-shirt is so tense right now that his shoulders are up around his ears. Your last line of defense has been trying to pump up his bike tire ever since I first surveyed the Oval."

"I'm impressed. So I guess you know we have you surrounded."

"But how do you know that I didn't just call out the four members of your team to a pair of snipers?"

Her aura of certainty wavered. "You wouldn't do that. You're NSA and we're CIA."

"That matters far less than you think."

"And there are all these witnesses. You wouldn't kill anyone."

"I won't, but my snipers will. They'll take out the four members of your team and then slip away. While the other students are panicking, I'll heroically rush over to protect you, only you'll faint from all the excitement – and the tranquilizer I'll inject into you. We'll carry you off in the confusion. Before anyone figures out what happened, your team is dead, and you're on your way to be tortured to find out what you know."

She swallowed hard.

"This isn't something we do for fun. You did a good job to assume this wasn't some run-of-the-mill training op, but you were sloppy in your deployment. You set up looking into the sun, immediately putting yourself at a disadvantage. Even worse, each member of your team is predictably placed, each has distinguishing characteristics that attracts attention, and each chose a position that makes it difficult to react if the moment of truth comes. You're team lead?"

She nodded.

"If your team is gunned down, guess whose responsibility that is."

Her eyes turned distant. Then her sly little grin was back. "It's a good thing you don't have any snipers, then."

Casey grunted dubiously. "And why do you think that?"

"The guy with the goatee told me. His eyes widened when you mentioned them. You're bluffing."

Thornton might find a hunting knife shaving his chin yet. Still, he couldn't help but be impressed with the girl. Most people would be too focused on the conversation to watch for tells in the other agents.

He wasn't about to let her get in the last word. "One more thing. Even the most trivial of details can be critical, so don't reveal anything voluntarily. You gave up Bartowski when you told me how you got the watch."

Her eyes twinkled. "How do you know that wasn't part of my orders?"

Casey certainly wasn't expecting that. The idea made no sense, but he didn't detect the slightest hint of a lie.

What kind of game was Bartowski playing?

She gathered her things, watch included, and stood up. She stared him straight in the eye and said, "Major Casey, your reputation precedes you."

He felt even more off balance. "My reputation?"

"One of my friends joined the NSA after he graduated. When I found out I'd be meeting you, I put in a call to him to find out what I could. He couldn't give me any details, but you're a legend over there. It would be an honor to work with you some day."

She didn't wait for an answer. She just turned and walked away. Damn if the girl didn't have initiative, confidence, and a bit of style already. She needed some seasoning, no doubt, but there was some steel in that one.

Her four back-ups similarly packed up, each meeting Casey's eye and tilting their heads respectfully before going off in separate directions. He wondered how each would have reacted had they known why he was chasing Bartowski – for either of his missions.

"Back to the plane," Casey said gruffly, refusing to let any emotion creep into his voice.

* * *

"Buh-bye."

A flight attendant beamed expectantly from the galley to one side of the cockpit door. Given what might await Chuck in the terminal, he didn't feel much like grinning. Still, remaining inconspicuous was critical, so he forced a mumbled response through his clenched-tooth smile.

His mouth reverted to a thin line as he turned to follow the stream of exiting passengers. A blast of warmer air, redolent of gas fumes, stole in from the tarmac to ruffle his hair. The whine of the plane engines was louder outside the plane. The engines wound down. His stomach spun up. He had never felt so alone.

After pulling his plain green cap lower and throwing on a pair of sunglasses, he started up the confined jetway. The arrhythmic clumping of shoes sunk into the grooved rubber floor mats and the beige walls. Bright lights glared down from above. Few people spoke.

Even the moderate slope represented a significant effort. He was strung out from stress and lack of sleep. His tired limbs ached with each step. Lugging a laptop bag over one shoulder and his black duffel over the other seemed cruel and unusual.

He felt like he'd been up all night cramming for an exam. In a way, he had. When he entered the terminal, he would discover whether his plan, one that seemed reasonably solid on paper, was enough to fool several cadres of agents – or if he'd only been fooling himself.

The terminal and whatever else lay so close, so far ahead. He calculated the distance to the doorway and counted it down. Thirty feet. Twenty feet. Ten feet.

Time to see if grades were posted.

The river of passengers disgorged into the terminal. Most of them surged around the slower-moving Chuck. From his moving island in the center of the stream, his eyes skimmed a hundred people in the immediate vicinity. He saw people waiting for the next flight. He saw people walking perpendicular to his path as they went to and from other areas of the terminal. He saw people sitting at the restaurant across the way.

He didn't see anyone who might be looking for him.

No cluster of uniformed men stood waiting. No men in dark suits worked too hard to seem nonchalant. No Casey. No Sarah. That was a promising sign. Agents wouldn't know whether Chuck was hopping another flight, so they would likely want to pick up surveillance at the gate. Still, nothing was guaranteed. Not yet.

Taking a cue from an overhead sign, he headed left towards the baggage claim, using deliberately measured steps. Chuck didn't know much about the art of remaining inconspicuous, but he reasoned that anyone who moved at too fast a pace would stand out. He strove to find an appropriate middle ground between crawling behind a thin-haired man with a walker and sprinting for the concourse exit as fast as his leaden legs would carry him.

Minutes later, he reached a constantly revolving door that shuttled people from the secure area. A bored security woman sitting at a tall desk paid no attention as he entered the door. When he exited the opposite side, a boldly lettered sign hanging from the ceiling proclaimed, "Welcome to Dallas!"

He allowed himself a small smile.

Dallas was a logical destination for a number of reasons, foremost being a need to avoid potential delays. He could take a direct flight to Dallas, minimizing complications from connecting flights, and the weather forecast had been for clear and sunny skies all day.

A few airlines offered longer nonstop routes, such as New York or Washington. Chuck had been tempted to try to gain more of a lead with a single flight. However, people were going to figure out the ploy with the switched tickets, and a longer flight would allow a better opportunity for his opposition to catch up using a faster plane. Chuck needed to ensure enough of a cushion that he could make his next moves without them breathing down his neck.

Again taking his cues from overhead signs, he navigated through the terminal. He tried to keep his head tilted slightly downwards to minimize his face's exposure to the camera. The melting pot of travelers and airport workers were a blur to him, as he struggled to hide his face and watch his surroundings at the same time.

A pair of automatic doors split open for him, and he walked through them to the sidewalk outside. The line at the taxi stand was short. Inside of two minutes, Chuck was in a cab and heading away from the airport, periodically peeking at the traffic behind him.

He had no idea what he would do if the cab was followed.

* * *

They weren't even out of the parking lot and Casey was already regretting his decision to let Agent Thornton drive. Casey's blood pressure rose as he watched a perfectly good twenty-foot gap in traffic go unused. "If we aren't on the airplane in fifteen minutes," he said, "I promise you your next assignment will be monitoring illegal border crossings from Canada into Alaska."

"But we haven't had an illegal border crossing there in months!"

"Maybe we just aren't looking hard enough."

Thornton's face paled. Their black sedan shot into the next twenty-foot gap with a squeal of tires and a blast of a horn from the cut-off driver.

It was all a question of motivation, Casey mused. People didn't know what they could do until they had no choice. Fear was a powerful motivator.

That made Chuck Bartowski a dangerous adversary right now.

His phone rang. The ID indicated Agent Hale. Casey had made up an excuse to leave Hale at the commuter airport to make slipping away with Bartowski that much easier. Now Hale was conveniently in position to track down where Bartowski had really gone. Better to be lucky than smart.

"Go," Casey said.

"Jeff Barnes had a ticket on Oceanic flight 713, leaving LAX at 11:13 am and arriving at DFW at 4:08 pm local time. Flight manifest confirms a full flight."

Casey checked his watch. Bartowski was already on the ground. "Lay out a flight plan to DFW. Request a priority approach into DFW on my authority. Wheels up in fourteen minutes. Do it."

Without waiting for an answer, he hung up. He immediately dialed into an NSA intelligence center to the analyst assigned to support his team.

"Agent O'Leary," she said.

"Casey here. I need the security camera footage for DFW airport uploaded to our plane's computers."

"There are 1,975 security cameras at DFW. Can you be more specific?"

"Look up the arrival gate for Oceanic flight 713 from Los Angeles. Start from the cameras there and upload any footage between the gate and the nearest exits, including transport points to other terminals and public transportation loading zones. We'll go from there."

"Yes, sir."

"Also, get me a list of Stanford alumni. Criteria: graduated between 2000 and 2004, currently residing in the Dallas / Fort Worth area." Bartowski was using every available resource in his efforts to escape, but his closest friends and family were now accounted for. He no longer trusted Walker, thanks to the divide Casey had created by planting the device in the watch. So, if Casey could eliminate the possibility that Bartowski was getting help from an old college crony, Casey could be fairly certain Bartowski would be on his own.

"OK."

"One more thing. I want you chained to your desk in case we need anything else."

"How late? I have plans tonight."

Casey pictured the look on Bartowski's face when he realized that he was caught. "So do I, Agent O'Leary. So do I."

* * *

Some friendly talk and a fifty-dollar cash tip got Chuck dropped off in the middle of a broad strip mall parking lot about half a mile short of the address he'd given the cab driver. He waved a thanks to the man as the cab drove off.

After a quick check for tailing cars and the normal parking lot traffic, he started lugging his bags towards a large grocery store about a hundred yards away. The cab driver turned onto the main road and disappeared. Chuck turned at a right-angle and headed for a stand-alone Starbucks. An upward-angled jet roared overhead as he pulled the door open and went inside. He scanned the interior, more because he felt he should than out of any real worry.

Chuck wasn't a Starbucks customer. A Buy More wage disappeared pretty quickly when half an hour of work went to purchase a single cup of coffee. Still, he imagined this Starbucks was pretty much like any other, a carefully standardized shrine to all things related to coffee. Standard coffee aromas and inoffensive music wafted through the air. Standard baristas, looking like Lit majors with aprons, waited patiently for Chuck's order. Standard lighting beautifully highlighted all his purchase options - pastries, mugs with pithy sayings, some reading material, and about 87,000 variations on a cup of coffee, if their marketing literature was to be believed.

Chuck passed on all 87,000 variations. He headed towards a back corner dominated by a high L-shaped bar with silver-legged stools. At the far right end of the bar stood two men decked out in Dockers. They hovered over a Powerpoint presentation on a laptop, talking in passionate but hushed tones. Chuck marked them as officers for some start-up. He doubted that the subject of their discussion was anywhere close to as critical as they clearly felt it was.

Towards the other end of the bar, a woman with straight raven-black hair leaned her shoulder blades against the bar, keeping a bit of space between her and the businessmen. She seemed more interested in her folded newspaper than her cup of coffee. Chuck walked up next to her, close but not too close, and set his duffel bag on the floor. He lifted his computer bag onto the bar and fiddled with the zipper. "Anyone following me?" Chuck asked out of the corner of his mouth.

"Three men, dark suits, all wearing shoulder holsters," she said without making eye contact. "Heading for the store."

Chuck couldn't stop from turning and staring at her. He'd been so careful. "Really?"

The corners of her mouth turned up, though she didn't take her eyes off the paper.

He exhaled hard. "Very funny."

"I thought so," Mei-Ling Cho said in her thick Oriental accent. "Then again, I do not get out much these days." Her wolfish grin grew.

Mei-Ling was China's top agent until a few months ago. Because her government would not help her rescue her kidnapped brother, she had come to Los Angeles without her government's sanction to try to rescue him. She failed initially, in part because Chuck unknowingly helped a group called the Triad escape her attack. He made up for it later by brokering a deal for Team Chuck to help her, if she promised to defect in exchange. It would have been a much fonder memory had she not been pointing a gun at his head while he suggested the deal.

Now Mei-Ling was in a protection program in the Dallas suburbs, fulfilling her part of the bargain by delivering all of the information she knew about the Chinese government's intelligence activities. Chuck had always liked her, at least once she had stopped pointing guns at him. Anybody who would give up everything to save a sibling was all right in his book.

"Thank you for coming," Chuck said.

"My pleasure. I am happy for the distraction."

"Life not so good in Plano?"

Her eyes grew hard. "It is all strip malls, with only the occasional actual mall to break up the monotony. How much shopping can one woman be expected to do? Besides, your government does not pay very well."

If only she knew how true that was. "They haven't set you up with a job?"

"Not yet. They tell me it will be at least a year."

"I didn't think there would be that much debriefing to do."

"There is not. The first month was very busy, but now they only come to me with very specific questions. It is strange that they do not talk to me more, as the information in my head becomes stale and less valuable every day."

Chuck knew how that went. "Well, at least you have all that free time."

"To do what?"

"There have to be things you've always wanted to do after your agent life was over – hobbies, sports, those kinds of things?"

She eyed him curiously. "Chuck, agents never think about the future. We live in the moment, because things can change in a moment. There are always new orders, new missions, new enemies. Besides, most agents never make it to retirement, so we do not waste time dreaming about what can never be."

Her words struck a nerve. Whenever Chuck had wanted to talk to Sarah about their future, she would always talk about wanting what time they could have. Time and time again, no matter how he had pushed, she was never willing to talk about anything more. While he had eventually accepted her stance, he had never appreciated why Sarah might feel that way until that moment. He felt guilty about that. "I'm sorry," he said, as much to the absent Sarah as to Mei-Ling.

"No, I am the one who should apologize," Mei-Ling said. "You do not have time to listen to my problems. There is much to be done."

She was right, especially since Fulcrum now knew that Chuck was the Intersect and he had fled from his handlers. It was even more critical that he avoid being captured.

Things had changed.


	11. Messages Within Messages

Sarah plopped down the edge of Chuck's bed. She had to admit that he had done a really nice job.

Unable to figure out anything over at Casey's, she had waited for Ellie to leave for the hospital and then searched Chuck's room for any clues about where he might be. As soon as she had walked in, it was obvious that he had covered his tracks. He was by no means a slob, but the room was immaculate. A thorough search confirmed his room was devoid of any clues – no receipts, no notes on scraps of paper, nothing. Hitting redial on his land-line phone called Information.

As she would expect, his computer was clean as well. She had expected the usual, like a clean browser cache, an emptied recycle bin, maybe even some new encryption. However, Chuck had done the right thing and erased his hard drive. It was possible NSA or CIA might be able to recover something, but since Chuck knew what he was doing, it was bound to be a time-consuming and fruitless effort.

The only useful thing she'd discovered was that Chuck hadn't left empty-handed. He had accumulated a number of spy gadgets and credentials during his various missions, and Sarah knew all the places he kept them. A cigar box under the bed, the hidden vault in the closet, a plastic bin with a few miscellaneous Stanford items concealing the equipment below – all had been emptied. She made a mental note to check if Chuck's falsified credentials had been used, but anyone who planned so meticulously wasn't likely to make that simple a mistake. If any of them were used, in all likelihood it would just be part of another false trail.

Twenty minutes in, Sarah had finished with his room, so she had expanded her search. A circuit of the apartment and a none-too-appetizing dumpster dive had dirtied her clothes and dampened her spirit. Nothing. There was nothing.

She looked around the room one last time. All of it fit. This was no panicked escape. Chuck had planned to run, probably as soon as he learned about the device in the watch, and had engineered an escape that had baffled two of the government's best. He had taken advantage of the distraction provided by Fulcrum to escape. He had sent Casey almost to the desert and now to Stanford, while Sarah had gotten a tour of Los Angeles just to end up in Chuck's room, wondering what to do next.

Unable to come up with an answer, she found herself staring at the picture of Chuck and her from the Halloween party. She was wearing the Princess Leia bikini she had the CIA make as an apology for giving him a fake picture of the two of them with a bug hidden in the back. _I wanted to give you a new photo of us and I figured that it should be something real_, she had told him. It had elicited one of his classic smiles, a smile so bright and genuine that it had drowned out everything else in the room.

Now he was gone, and it was hard to blame him. She had promised there was nothing in the watch. He had found the device, just as he had found the bug in the picture, and assumed that Sarah was the one who planted it. This time she wasn't going to get another chance.

_Get up_, the agent in her urged. _He's gone and there's nothing here. You'll need to find him some other way._ But she couldn't leave. Leaving without finding another clue meant accepting that he no longer trusted her. She had been so sure she would find something at the end of the trail he had left her.

Her hands couldn't stand to be idle, so they reached behind her head to undo the clasp of her necklace. She cradled the heart-shaped pendant between her thumbs and forefingers. The chain of necklace drooped towards the floor like the stem of a lifeless flower. She opened up the pendant to look at the picture she'd put there for their cover, a close-in shot of Chuck and Sarah, her arm around him, his cheek pressed against hers. After using her fingernail to scrape out the picture, she flipped it over to read his note. Three tiny little words, barely legible, plus an abbreviated signature.

"I trust you. -C"

She sucked in a breath as she stared at the words. Emotion began to take over. "Stay calm, Walker," she muttered. She ignored herself. The words grew blurry.

So many damn secrets. He had trusted her, and she had destroyed that trust. Maybe that was the message he had left her. Maybe the message was simply that his trust was gone, and so was he.

That would explain why Chuck would want her to go visit Jay, to be sure she knew that he had found the chip. That would explain why Chuck sent her to the beach, to remind her of how she once asked, almost demanded, that Chuck trust her. That would explain why Chuck sent her to Ellie, to remind her how they had invited her into their home, and exactly how Sarah had repaid that kindness.

She tilted her chin upwards in a vain effort to keep the tears from spilling. A pair of drops raced down opposite cheeks, alternately speeding up and slowing down, trailing over the curves of her cheeks to plummet off her jaw.

So many damn secrets. Chuck's secret was a sweet note in his gift to her. Her secret was not telling him about the device Casey planted in her gift to him, a lie of omission. She hadn't wanted Chuck to worry about Casey. She hadn't trusted Chuck could handle things.

She hadn't trusted him.

The tears were running freely now. So many damn secrets. She squeezed her eyes shut to try to stem the tide, but she couldn't escape her own guilt. Had he trusted her, he would have left some way for her to find him. Some message, some hint, something. But he very plainly, very obviously, very deliberately had left nothing for her. So what was left? "FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear." Is that all there was?

She stared at the mental image of the message in her mind, her numb mind wandering over it.

"FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear." Or, looking at just the capital letters, "FIND M+E."

"Find me."

A message within a message? Or just coincidence?

Her mind ranged out, questing, searching for more clues. It locked onto the message Morgan had sent, at Chuck's direction, from Chuck's phone. "Meet me." She had thought it was only about the obvious, and she had followed the phone trail to Morgan. It could mean more.

Her hope growing, she started remembering everything she could from the time she met Jay. She recounted her conversation with Morgan. He had said, "It's fine to have secrets, as long as there's a good reason for them. As long as we have each other's best interests at heart." Chuck's words, not Morgan's. Had Chuck planted those lines, hoping they would come out in the conversation? Could Chuck know that she hadn't planted the device?

'Find me'. 'Meet me'. She looked down at the pendant in her fingers. 'I trust you.'

It could all be coincidence. Her brain was working overtime to find something to prove that Chuck still trusted her. She could be seeing things where there was nothing to see.

There was only one way to know for sure. If he still trusted her, he would have left a way for her to find him, something only she could find.

Sarah straightened her back, stood and paced back and forth across the room. She started going through it all again. Chuck had left a trail for her, and her alone. The trail ended at the apartment. Ellie didn't have the clue. So, the clue must be in his room. But where? She'd already searched it top to bottom.

_Think, Walker._ She scanned the room again. On the surface, the room seemed like a dead end, but something sounded an off-key note. The clean-up was too perfect. Chuck had laid down false trail after false trail to keep Sarah and Casey running around, yet Chuck hadn't done that here.

Were she dealing with some cocky agent, she might have read the whole scene as some kind of mocking farewell. _Want to know where I am? Call Information!_ But that wasn't Chuck. He wasn't the kind to trumpet his victories. So why did he leave no false trails here, the place where it would have been simplest to leave one?

She was hoping Chuck had sent her messages within the messages. Maybe the state of his room held a message. Maybe the message here was not to get distracted by anything unimportant like his computer. To look a little more carefully. To highlight something.

She took a careful look around the room and then closed her eyes, picturing the room as it usually sat. It was perfectly organized, with everything where it belonged – everything except the picture of her and Chuck. He used to keep it on his nightstand. He had left it on top of the low bookcase.

Her eyes popped open, centered on the picture. Only she would know about the picture's significance to the two of them. Only she would think to look there. And it wouldn't be the first time he'd left her a message behind a picture.

A large lump lodged at the base of her throat. Had she been staring at the clue's hiding spot and not realized it? Had she been that close to missing it?

A deep breath later, she crossed the room to retrieve the picture. She picked up the frame and took it back to the bed, laying it face down. Slowly, so very slowly, she twisted the tabs that held the cardboard backing in place and lifted it off.

Hidden behind the picture was an ivory-colored envelope, barely fitting inside the frame. Reaching down, clumsy fingers found purchase on the envelope and rescued it from its hiding spot. Her heart trembled.

A fingertip snaked under a gap in the sealed flap and tore the envelope open. Thumb and forefinger pulled out the contents, a simple birthday card, one that could no doubt be purchased at a thousand gift or grocery stores. The cover had a round cake with chocolate icing sitting on the table. "Happy Birthday!" was spelled out on the cake in bright pink frosting letters. A small, long-haired dog stood on a chair, front paws on the table, panting happily.

She had never seen anything quite so amazing.

She turned and collapsed next to the disassembled frame. She opened the card. Inside was a slip of paper and another picture of the cake, now on the floor, with the dog's black-and-white snout covered in frosting. A message read, "Sorry I messed up your birthday!" Underneath, he had signed the card, "Thank you … for everything. Chuck".

She touched his handwriting lovingly. He had figured out her riddle. He knew that yesterday was her birthday. Somehow, even that knowledge meant the world to Sarah.

Finding nothing else on the card, she went to the piece of paper. On it was a note scribbled in Chuck's sloppy cursive hand-writing.

_Sarah-_

_An American can be only be asked to do so much for his country. However, now it falls to me to look out for myself for a change, as strange as that feels after having you watch over me for so long._

_I can never, ever thank you enough for what you've done for me. You believed in me, even when I didn't. You pushed me to be so much more than I was. I doubt I would have survived six days without you there, let alone six months. So thank you. Thank you with every fiber of my being._

_You know why I had to leave, Sarah. You were the one who always recognized the reality of the situation, who always said that you wanted to have what time we could have together. Unfortunately, our time seems to have run out._

_I'm sorry that I had to leave like this. I hope you understand. Maybe we'll see each other again, and when we do, everything will have changed. Right now it seems like too much to hope for, but I like to believe that it will happen._

_Chuck_

_p.s. Thank you for sharing something real with me. I hope you realize how much that truly means._

Sarah read the note four times, alternating from the sheer joy elicited by his words to the heart-rending sorrow of knowing that he was gone. Her lip quivered as she clutched at the note with both hands, as if tightening her grip on the edges would somehow give her a handhold to pull him back to her.

Why hadn't he asked her to go with him?

She let out a strangled laugh as soon as she posed herself the question. She had already given Chuck the answer a hundred times. The job came first.

As his handler, her job would require her to talk him down, assassination device or no. She could hear herself saying the words. _Chuck, the CIA can take care of you. We're not going to let anything happen to you. It's best to stay where we can protect you, here on home turf._ She was damn good at her job. It was the other thing that she wasn't always so good at.

Now that Fulcrum knew about the Buy More, Beckman and Graham would want Chuck secured. Had Chuck stayed, he'd probably be in a windowless van heading for an underground bunker of dubious safety at that very moment.

She ran her fingertips across the note, feeling the ridges where Chuck's pen had pressed letters into the paper. Her agent's mind, never at rest, scanned the letter again. The penmanship suggested haste, as if he'd composed the letter on the fly, but the words seemed carefully chosen, almost stilted. The note was bordering on too sweet, if that were possible, but she couldn't fault him for that. She grinned, picturing Casey's reaction if he ever read the message. He'd likely crumple it up and throw it in the nearest trash can.

Her smile fled. Maybe that was part of the point. If Casey ever searched Chuck's room, he could have found the note. He probably wouldn't bother with a full search, just as Sarah almost hadn't bothered, but why risk it?

All along, Chuck had left her messages within messages. Why not here, in some form only she could understand?

Sarah read the note again. She gasped.

She knew how to find Chuck.

* * *

_Author's note – if you think you figured out what Sarah figured out, please let me know via message. I'm curious how difficult it was. Please do not put guesses into a comment, as I don't want anyone to spoil things for others. _


	12. Signals in the Noise

_Thanks to baylink, my beta-reader on this chapter. Feels good to have the band back together._

_All mistakes are my own._

* * *

Casey stared through the driver's side window of his car. His throat rumbled a long guttural promise that Bartowski would pay dearly for this.

Things had seemed to be heading in the right direction. The NSA team had made terrific time from Stanford to DFW. General Beckman was none too pleased that Bartowski had faked out Casey so thoroughly, but she re-channeled her exasperation to good purpose. Rattling the right cages secured clearances for a priority vector and an immediate landing.

That still left plenty of flight time to suss out where Bartowski had gone. Tracking him out of the airport had been a trivial matter. Security camera footage showed him coming off the plane, walking through the terminal and getting into a cab. A quick phone call to the cab company and a casual mention of some INS agents visiting the dispatch center got Casey the address where the cab dropped him off.

Then things started to go wrong. The destination address was a mall seven miles from the airport, so the cab could have dropped off Bartowski any number of places around the property. Another threatening phone call encouraged the dispatcher to get specific details from the cabbie. Casey was chagrined to learn that the drop-off point was a Buy More.

It was an entirely plausible destination for a Buy More employee looking for whatever support he could get, but given the Stanford episode, it reeked of another deception. Unfortunately, this was their only lead, so they had to investigate it. Thornton was tracking down security footage from the mall property to see whether they could get independent verification that Bartowski was ever there, while Hale and O'Leary were checking into recent cab and bus pick-ups in the area. That left Casey, uniquely knowledgeable in the inner workings of a Buy More franchise, to actually go to the store.

Casey's eyes bored into the all-too-familiar green and gold lettering. He hated what he had to do. He hated even more that Bartowski was making him do it.

Unable to put it off, Casey got out of his car, dragging his black zip-up jacket with him. He shrugged into the jacket as he crossed the lot, providing a fair measure of concealment for the combat gear beneath. He wasn't taking anything for granted any more.

He strolled through automatic doors into the Buy More. The doors shut behind him. Another rumble resonated in his throat as he surveyed the store.

This Buy More was almost identical to the Burbank branch. A ridiculous array of electronics and appliances beckoned, laid out to best inspire conspicuous consumption in the store's patrons. Casey's nose filled with heavily processed air laden with the scents of heavily processed products – plastic, styrofoam, glass, circuit boards. Once, he had romantically associated the smell of a Buy More with capitalism. Now he just associated it with boredom and useless crap.

_Speaking of useless…_ A familiar-looking cast of characters loitered near the centrally located Nerd Herd desk, as if expecting people to mistake proximity to the desk for productivity. Casey started towards them. Predictably, when they saw an actual customer approaching, most of them remembered more important things that needed doing and scattered.

Casey approached the lone remaining Nerd Herder. White shirt, gray tie, cheap pants, sycophantic demeanor. Yeah, Casey had seen his kind before.

"Welcome to Buy More," the Nerd Herder said. "How can I be of assistance today?"

"I'm looking for somebody. Chuck Bartowski. Know him?"

"You're looking for Chuck?"

Casey wouldn't have been more surprised if bin Laden emerged from hiding to open a series of McDonald's franchises. "Yes. Where is he?"

"Hang on." The Nerd Herder headed towards the break room.

The back of Casey's neck throbbed. He wasn't sure what he would do when Bartowski walked out. Casey hadn't planned for the possibility that Bartowski might be found this easily.

It turned out not to be an issue. From the back of the store, the helpful Nerd Herder returned with somebody who clearly wasn't Bartowski, unless he'd found a way to disguise himself as a short, vaguely plump woman with coppery hair and a black skirt. Her Buy More name tag identified her as Holly, the Nerd Herd supervisor for this store. On the opposite side of her shirt from her official tag was one of those generic "Hi, my name is" stickers that Casey had to slap onto his chest when he attended a formal NSA function. On the tag was written "Chuck".

Casey couldn't wait for the explanation for this one.

"Hi, I'm Holly," she said in a perky tone.

"Are you sure?" he asked pointedly.

She laughed. "Pretty sure. You're here as part of the geocaching event, right?"

"Um, yeah."

"Are you sure?" she asked with a playful grin.

His agent's instincts told him to keep things vanilla until he understood what the hell was going on. "I'm looking for Chuck. I had reason to believe I should ask for him here."

"This is the right place, but you seem confused. I would have thought Chuck would have explained what geocaching is."

"Let's just say that Chuck didn't explain a lot of things."

"No problem. In geocaching, you're given various GPS coordinates that lead you to different locations. At each location you find another clue. The first one to reach the last location gets the prize."

Casey decided not to tell her what would happen to the 'prize' when he was caught. "That sounds about right."

"You found your way here, so here is your next clue." She pulled a thin slip of paper from behind the pocket protector in her shirt pocket and handed it to Casey.

He looked at the paper. All it contained was a phone number: 863-370-1090.

"Can I expect a lot more people?" she asked.

"Probably not." He had a sobering thought. "Am I the first one here?"

"Nope. You're second. But don't worry; you're not far behind your competition."

"Blond woman?"

"Nope. Tall guy in a suit. Didn't seem to be enjoying the game too much either."

Great. Somebody, maybe Fulcrum, maybe CIA, had beaten him here. Either way, that opened up a whole new world of things to deal with. "I guess I'd better get going then. Thank you for this."

"No problem. Good luck!"

Casey decided not to offer up a snide remark as he turned and walked away. He would take all the luck he could get at this point.

Just inside the automatic doors, he stopped. He dialed the number on the slip of paper and put the phone to his ear. After one ring, the call went to voice mail.

"Hi there!" Chuck's voice said cheerily over a slight buzz of background conversation. "If you're listening to this message, you're actively involved in the game _Where In the World Is Chuck Bartowski? _At this point, you've successfully followed me to the metropolitan Dallas / Fort Worth area. Congratulations! If you're hungry, I've heard Chuy's serves particularly good Tex-Mex, or if you're looking for something more upscale, you might want to try the Mansion at Turtle Creek.

"Now, I realize most of you would rather find me than a good meal. Don't take this the wrong way, but I would rather most of you not find me, because I suspect you have some fairly unpleasant things planned. I'm afraid that leaves us at a bit of an impasse, but keep your eyes peeled. It wouldn't be much of a game if I didn't offer up some clues along the way.

"Thanks for playing, and let's be careful out there."

*beep*

Casey squeezed his phone shut. He fought the urge to keep squeezing until the phone broke.

Oh, how Bartowski was going to pay for all of this.

* * *

A spy needs to be prepared for contingencies, the most basic of which is a quick departure. Take walking into a restaurant. The first thing most people look for are the daily specials or a person they are meeting. The first thing an agent looks for is the back door.

The same goes for leaving a city. Rule number one is always, always know your exit strategy. This can be trickier on longer-term assignments where a sudden departure seems less and less likely. It can be tempting to relax. However, a good spy never forgets that everything can change in an instant, and takes advantage of the extra time to plan and refine additional escape routes.

That's why, at any given moment, Sarah could outline five different plans for leaving Los Angeles, down to the weapons and even the outfit she would need for each. She could recite the eleven items she needed to collect from her apartment and specify which of those items belonged on her person and which could go in a bag. Most importantly, she had practiced her strategies enough to know how long it would take to exit her apartment for the last time. Her worst time was six minutes and forty-three seconds, including a change of clothes and the time it took to destroy the contents of her burn box.

Sarah opened the door to her apartment and put her chosen plan into action. After a few minutes of efficient movement, she was about ready. She finalized her outfit, strapping a sheath of throwing knives into the small of her back and sliding on a versatile fitted white blouse. Three quick tugs closed the zippers on her bag. She slung the bag over one shoulder, grabbed her still-smoking burn box and walked over to the door. As she put her hand on the door knob, she checked her watch, just as she had in so many practice sessions. She had bettered her worst time by thirty-seven seconds, more than acceptable.

She used the extra time to take a last look around. The apartment was formal, almost coldly so. Sarah always chose an apartment like this one, as a comfortable apartment was more difficult to leave. This wasn't a home; this was a place she slept while on a mission.

Still, she found herself wondering a bit wistfully if she would ever see it again. There were memories here, some of them fond, some of them not so much. A few involved Bryce. Most involved Chuck.

She was grateful that she didn't need to say goodbye to the latter memories yet. Item number twelve, Chuck's birthday card, was safely secured in her bag. Despite how she'd botched things by not telling him about the watch, he still trusted her. Hopefully she'd be seeing him soon, and then maybe the two of them could figure a way out of this mess.

Her face lit up as she firmly closed the door, excited that – unlike so many other departures – the closing of a door didn't mean the closing of a chapter.

* * *

Casey climbed back onto the NSA Learjet, looking for some excuse to vent his frustrations. Unfortunately, Agents Hale and Thornton were both feverishly pecking away at keyboards at their computer stations, while a flat-screen monitor on the front cabin wall showed Agent O'Leary doing the same in Maryland.

"Talk to me," Casey said. "What do we have?"

"I think the cabbie is lying to us," Thornton said. "He swears up and down that he dropped Bartowski off near the Buy More, but I can't find his cab on any of the mall's video footage. Should I bring him in?"

"Where is he now?"

"Downtown Dallas."

Casey pictured a map of the area and did some quick math. If traffic was bad, it could easily take 30 minutes, one way, to get to the cabbie. Bartowski would be long gone before they got answers. "Ignore him for now. What else?"

O'Leary looked down from the monitor. Her mass of wavy brunette hair blended in with a dark background, leaving only freckled pale skin and light green eyes to the casual glance. "There are five Stanford alumni from Bartowski's era living in the Dallas / Forth Worth area. One is vacationing in the Maldives, one is in Atlanta on business, and one is at home. We're still trying to track down the other two."

"Keep at it. What else?"

Hale spun his chair around to address Casey. His rounded crew-cut and physique gave testament to his military background. "Only one cab service picked up a fare at the mall in the last hour. The cabbie claims the fare was an old lady, and the destination address is an adult care facility about three miles from the mall."

Finally, something that could be eliminated. "Anything else?"

"Three different bus lines have stops around the mall. One goes back to the airport, one heads east into North Dallas, the other north to Farmer's Branch."

"Tell me about the phone number."

Hale said, "It's a Google Voice account – a free service designed to ring and text all your phone devices from a single number. The area code is from Florida, so it's obviously meaningless."

"You're probably right, but don't rule anything out. Tracking Bartowski is going to be different than any other pursuit you've done." Casey thought about Holly's description of geocaching. "Could there be GPS coordinates hidden in the phone number?"

"Interesting. 863-370-1090, right? The only combination that really makes sense is 37 degrees 0 minutes north, 109 degrees 0 minutes west." Hale brought up a tool on his monitor and dutifully typed the numbers in. The map auto-zoomed lower, centered around a graphic emblem at the center of the map. "It's in Colorado."

"Where?"

A couple keystrokes later, the position was further isolated. "The intersection of highway 160 and an Indian road near Four Corners Monument. Could be directions to a meet-up."

"Maybe. For now stay focused on how he would get there." Casey rubbed his face. Bartowski wasn't missing a chance to lay down some kind of trail.

Casey thought about the Google Voice account some more. "Can you figure out where the account was last accessed and any phone numbers tied to it?"

"Sure, but I'll need something official from General Beckman. Google doesn't hand out that kind of info willingly."

"You'll get it." Casey turned to the monitor to address O'Leary. "The phone message – any luck with the background noise?"

She said, "One of the techs made a recording of the message and removed Bartowski's voice. We can hear two men speaking in low voices, but the only words we could clearly make out were 'crossing the chasm' and 'tent pole event'."

"What the hell?"

"We also heard a call-out for an 'Iced Single Venti Mocha, No Whip'."

"Great. He was at a Starbucks. There will only be a couple hundred of those in the Dallas / Fort Worth area." He thought about that for a minute. "How many Starbucks are within five miles of the airport?"

O'Leary gazed off-camera, checking her monitor as she tapped at her keyboard. "Eleven, including two in the airport. Expand the search to ten miles and there are twenty-eight."

"How many within two miles of the mall?"

She tapped at her keyboard. "Three."

"How many–"

"Sir?" Thornton said.

"What?"

"You're going to want to see this."

Thornton commandeered the left half of the wall monitor by shrinking the video feed of Agent O'Leary to fill only half the screen. A list of credit card charges appeared, all made by Charles Bartowski, all within the previous five minutes.

Amtrak, $106.35

Amtrak, $53.20

Dallas Area Regional Transit, $50.00

Enterprise Rent-a-car, $87.19

Fort Worth Transportation Authority, $50.00

Greyhound, $49.12

Greyhound, $35.51

Southwest Airlines, $319.88

Superior Rent-a-car, $95.46

The list increased in length even as the team watched, each record inserting into the list with a soft beep. The list auto-sorted by company and cost.

"What is he doing?" Thornton asked.

Casey fit together the pieces in his head. "Bartowski has two choices – make no mistakes so that we can't track down the clues, or make a lot of noise to keep us busy. He knows we'll need to track each of these purchases in case he uses it."

O'Leary asked, "But what if it's all noise?"

Casey gave her a grim smile. "That's what's smart about it. He could hop in a cab and pay cash, or he could be trying to conserve cash by using his credit card one last time. We need to check all of these out."

The three other agents stared at Casey, overwhelmed by the task in front of them. Two more soft beeps indicated two more purchases had registered.

"Let's go, people," Casey said. "That list isn't getting any shorter."

* * *

One of Chuck's burn phones vibrated again. He was surprised at just how many people had called into his Google voice account. At least he had no delusions about how many people were after him.

He checked the list of phone numbers in his small notebook. A little help might get him a list of the people following him. A little ingenuity might allow him to set up some rudimentary tracking on the cell phones from the list. With any luck, none of it would be necessary. He was close to getting away now.

The Dallas area was starting to feel a little crowded. It was time to leave.


	13. Closing In

_Once again, my thanks to Baylink for the beta._

* * *

It had taken thirty-five precious minutes, but Casey and his team had finally completed triage on Bartowski's purchasing binge. All told, he had made 19 separate online purchases. Chuck was going to have one hell of a credit card bill if he somehow lived to pay it.

The proximity of Dallas to Fort Worth had complicated things. The ground to cover was doubled, and Bartowski was shrewd enough to spread his purchases around. The left side of the wall monitor now showed a map with all the possible routes represented by the purchases. The map looked like a rainbow-colored spider web.

At least the plane flights weren't a problem. Casey had alerts set up on all of Bartowski's credentials, so even if the NSA hadn't been watching his credit card, they would have known the moment he boarded a flight. Since they were in Dallas, one phone call would have ensured the plane didn't take off before Casey got there. Game over.

The flip side was that the team had been forced to write off local transportation, as the regional transit authorities didn't track passenger information. If Bartowski stayed local, they would need to hope that he made some kind of mistake and showed up on the grid again. But to stay local, he would need to keep his cool, and Casey was betting that Bartowski was going to run.

That left ground transportation out of Dallas. Each company on the list had a different mechanism for tracking passengers, and each mechanism left much to be desired. Amtrak, for example, didn't start scanning tickets until the train was underway, so Bartowski would have an extra fifteen-minute cushion if he hopped a train.

The various systems did have enough hooks that the team was able to watch them for activity, but they needed to do it manually. That meant tasking both Thornton and O'Leary to cover those systems, leaving only Casey and Hale to pursue their other leads. Just another in a series of minor victories for Bartowski. Luckily, Casey only had to win once.

With things momentarily under control, he walked over to the wet bar and grabbed a plastic bottle of orange juice from the small built-in refrigerator. He snapped the cap off its plastic guard and downed the contents in a single go. With a bit of a start, he realized that although he was almost painfully thirsty, he hadn't eaten in several hours and didn't feel the slightest pang of hunger.

The first symptoms of the Fulcrum poison were starting to manifest.

He compartmentalized the worry. Nothing to be done about it but re-focus on what would get him the antidote. He grabbed a bottle of water, walked to the back of the plane cabin and dropped into a plush swiveling chair. The chair felt a little too good after the day he'd had. He wasn't going to stay there long, but he needed a few minutes to figure some things out.

First up was putting himself into Bartowski's Chuck Taylors. Until Casey understood Bartowski's objectives, Casey could only react to what Bartowski did. That gave Chuck a big advantage.

Plus, he needed to figure out who his competition from the Buy More was. Walker was back in Los Angeles, as far as he could tell, but she could have sent a spook in her place. More likely it was Fulcrum. They didn't like sitting on the sidelines.

Whoever it was, they were getting their information from high up. The source was either in Beckman's office, in Graham's office ... or in the room with him. Maybe Jennings had lied to him when he said there wouldn't be Fulcrum agents on Casey's team. Yet another cheerful thought.

He stared at the map and all its possibilities again. There were too many moving pieces for normal circumstances. But now, if he didn't find Bartowski in the next day or so, he was going to die.

"No pressure," Casey muttered to himself.

* * *

"Sir?" Hale said.

Casey's eyes popped open. A digital clock on the front wall told him he'd fallen asleep for twenty minutes. _Damn poison._ "What is it?"

"We got the information from Google."

"We got a phone number?"

"Phone numbers. Bartowski forwarded his messages to three different phones."

Casey started getting an all-too-familiar feeling in his gut. More games. He forced his unwilling body upright, giving the haze in his head a chance to clear a bit. "Can we track them?"

"Already on the monitor."

He looked towards the front wall. Three phone numbers blinked on the map in little round bubbles. One was heading to Fort Worth, one was already in Dallas, and one was heading north towards Farmer's Branch.

The team stared at the map. "Which one do we follow?" Thornton asked.

Hale said, "We can't know which one is actually Bartowski. We need to follow all of them."

Casey noticed something. ""No. They're all decoys."

"Sir?"

"Look at the map. See anything strange?"

The team was quiet. After a long moment, O'Leary said, "None of the routes head south."

"Give the lady a cigar. Bartowski laid down a ton of trails, but he didn't lay a single one to the south. He didn't want us to get lucky and end up going the right direction." A rookie mistake. Finally.

"So how do we find him?"

Casey thought about that for a moment. Heading too far south meant bumping up against the Gulf of Mexico or the Mexican border. That meant fewer escape routes, which went against the way Bartowski had played things until now. So, that strategy didn't make sense unless he planned on crossing the border. But Bartowski couldn't cross the border on his own – Canadian and Mexican border authorities had orders not to let him leave the country.

To cross the border, Bartowski would need help. Help meant one person. Walker.

Casey said, "Could Bartowski have left a hidden clue in his phone message?"

"I thought of that," said Thornton. "He made reference to _Where in the World is Chuck Bartowski_, which is a play off of the old computer game _Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego_, so he might be doubling back to San Diego. He referred to Chuy's, which is a restaurant chain with locations all over Texas, not to mention Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. Turtle Creek is the name of a winery in Massachussetts, a casino in Michigan, and a golf course in Pennsylvania. He also said, 'Let's be careful out there,' a reference to Hill Street Blues, so maybe wherever he's going is on Hill Street. Heck, for all we know, the area code or the GPS coordinates in the phone number could point to where he's going."

Casey raised an eyebrow. "Frustrated, Agent Thornton?"

The other agent almost said something else, but thought better of it. "Sorry, sir."

Casey let it go. Bartowski was frustrating all of them. "Can a Google Voice account be set up to give different messages to different phone numbers?"

"Yes."

"Can you spoof a phone number and call in?"

"Sure. What number?"

Casey's phone buzzed with an incoming call. Walker was calling for another update. Good. If Walker was calling for updates, it meant her foot was still nailed to the ground in Los Angeles. She wouldn't call once she left town, because while the NSA couldn't pinpoint her exact location, they could trace her call back to a particular cell tower. She wouldn't want Casey to know where she was, so as long as he kept getting phone calls, that meant she hadn't left to rendezvous with Bartowski.

He touched a button to freeze the display and held out the phone so the man could read her number. "This one."

Hale brought up a green command-line window with a plain white font and typed furiously. Casey understood little of it besides the phone number. Soon, Hale punched the Enter key and a batch of text scrolled down the window. Speakers emitted a series of sounds for the numbers being dialed. The phone rang once. Chuck spoke, his voice fast and soft, vastly different from the brave front he put up in the other message.

"I'm too tired to be eloquent, Sarah, so hopefully this will all come out right. I'm no Superman, but I'm smart enough to figure some things out, and I know you didn't put the device in the watch. Casey did.

"I'm not sure whether you're with Casey, but if you are, slip away from him and meet me in Laredo. You can figure out where I'll be waiting. You just need to think about something real we shared. Meet me before twenty-three-hundred on Wednesday, but after that I'll need to leave. Casey is too close behind.

"Don't be fooled, Sarah – I don't pretend to know what the future holds. All I know is that if we can share something real, maybe that's the first step to figuring out how to be together."

Casey grinned and clapped Hale on the shoulder. Finally, they knew where Bartowski was going.

Walker would have heard the message. Casey had given her the phone number from the Buy More in a previous update, thinking it to be harmless enough. He had damn near given her and Bartowski a chance to meet up and cross the border from Laredo into Mexico, and then the two would have become nearly impossible to track.

Walker was still in Los Angeles because if she moved too soon, there was a better chance she'd attract attention. But she wouldn't wait much longer. She would need to leave for Laredo soon so she had enough time to find Chuck and arrange anonymous passage for the two of them to cross the border.

Bartowski – and Walker – were going to have a very unpleasant surprise waiting for them in Laredo.

* * *

Sarah switched off her phone when her call rolled to Casey's voice mail. She was glad he didn't answer. He had hardly been in a sharing mood when she had gotten him to pick up, and it saved her from having to feed him the lie she had fabricated. Besides, she had the information she needed. If Casey didn't answer, he didn't have Chuck.

She slid the phone into her pocket and stepped between two buildings onto the airport tarmac. A series of monochromatic hangars ran along each side of the broad strip of concrete. Oil and gas fumes lingered over the runways ahead, discernible both by the heavy smell and their rippling distortion of the low orange sun. A smallish jet taxied the other direction towards one of the back hangars. She paid it no mind. It was the wrong model, too small for what she needed, and she already had targets picked out.

To get to Chuck, she needed a plane, and there were plenty to be found at the Van Nuys airport. The airport was convenient, not just because it was located only twenty minutes from her apartment, but because it was one of the busiest general aviation airports in the world. An extra flight out at any time of day or night was unlikely to draw attention.

Her hair was pulled back in a pony tail beneath a black baseball cap with "KRO Financial" custom-lettered on the front. Some official-looking forms were pinned to her clipboard, the stack subdivided into sets with binder clips. Each set contained detailed information on a prospect who had a charter jet with the appropriate range and speed to get her where she needed to go without stopping to refuel. More importantly, each owner had a weakness that Sarah could exploit.

Her first prospect was just a few hangars down from her starting point. The hangar door was closed; the office was dark. Sarah shifted the top sheaf of papers to the back of the stack and moved on.

Three buildings down, she found candidate plane number two in the hangar behind an open door, but the office was locked and there was no sign of the pilot. She mentally marked that one a maybe.

She ducked between hangars to slide over to the next row. Emerging from the shadows, she spotted her third target plane and its pilot on the tarmac across the way. She breathed a relieved sigh, then put on her surliest expression as she approached.

The pilot was a kind-looking man, silver-haired with bushy eyebrows and a blue flight jacket. An exterior access panel under one of the wing-mounted jets sat open, and he was poking around the engine with a small screwdriver. She didn't bother addressing him. She walked right past him to read the plane's registry number from the plane's tail, penning a large check mark next to the matching number on her form.

The pilot looked curiously at her. "Can I help you?" he asked in a raspy voice.

"Are you Dominic Santini of Santini Air?

"Yes."

"Then you can help by staying out of my way." She started circling the plane, beginning a pre-flight check.

"I don't understand."

"I assume you understand the past due notices that your bank was sending you."

"But–"

"But nothing. They sold us your loan, and I'm here to repossess the plane." She started inspecting the left wing, checking the motion of the flap and the aileron.

"I just talked to the bank last week. We worked out a payment plan. They said I had time!"

"Time's up. The papers have been filed, and this plane now belongs to us." Satisfied that the left wing was in good working order, she walked around the back of the plane to inspect the other wing.

"Look," he started, then hurried to follow her around the plane. "Things are starting to turn around. I've got a big contract lined up in the Midwest starting tomorrow. I'll net thirty-six thousand in the next week. Let me complete the contract, and I'll pay you guys eighty percent of that money. I've got two other contracts this month that will allow me to do the same."

"Yeah, we've heard that before." She pulled one last time on the wing, and then walked towards the front of the plane, running her fingers along the fuselage to check for cracks and other signs of wear.

Behind her, so quietly she almost didn't hear, he said, "Don't take this plane. It's all I have."

She had expected more desperate bargaining. She hadn't expected the quiet dignity of the man's request. It was all she could do to keep up the pretense, to feign indifference to the man's plight. Her plan would still work, but she'd feel far worse about it.

Sarah pretended to appraise Dominic. "You seem like an honest man. Let's say for a moment that I believed your story, and was prepared to make an exception. The problem is that we don't see any money coming in for, what, a week? Then my boss is on my back, and if you don't come through, I'm screwed."

His logical answer was to tell Sarah to go repossess one of the other planes in the stack. She even went so far as to lift the clipboard a bit, as if by coincidence, to prompt him with the answer. Apparently Dominic wasn't the type of man to throw somebody else under a truck he'd narrowly dodged. "I can't offer you anything more," he said. "I'll get you the money."

"Look, I need to bring in something by noon tomorrow, and the only other planes on my list are halfway across the county. If you can give me a lift, I can grab another plane in the morning, and you can have your extra week to come through. Otherwise, I need to take yours."

Dominic thought about it, then nodded acceptance, although he clearly wasn't all that happy about it.

That made two of them.

* * *

The NSA Learjet was a whirlwind of activity. Casey and Thornton were stowing notes and computers in the main cabin while Hale was in the pilot's chair arguing with the control tower about how soon they could take off.

The speakers on the high-def monitor let out a quick sequence of musical beeps, indicating the audio had been activated. "Agent Casey," O'Leary called.

Casey looked up. She looked excited about something. "We're about to go wheels up. Is this important?"

"Very. We–"

"Hang on." He turned to Thornton. "Go help Hale convince those morons in the control tower that we need to take off now. Not in an hour, not in ten minutes, right now."

Thornton nodded and left. Casey put away some papers as he asked, "What'd you find?"

"We got a hit on one of Bartowski's car rental reservations. He picked up a car."

At that, Casey's head popped up. "Where?"

"About thirty minutes south of your location."

"Did we ever finish locating Bartowski's potential Stanford connections?"

"Yes, sir. All five are accounted for."

The gleam in her eye echoed his intuition. Somebody had to pick up the car, and with Walker in Los Angeles and the Stanford connections eliminated, it had to be Bartowski.

Now the credit card ploy made even more sense. It was tough to rent a car without a credit card, so Bartowski had used the other charges as a smokescreen. It wasn't a bad gamble, really. With all the false trails Bartowski had laid down, Casey had almost told the team to skip tracking the car rentals because, like the plane tickets, they had seemed like an obvious ruse. The reverse psychology had damn near paid off.

"You get the GPS tracking information for the car?"

"Sent to your phone."

Casey nodded approvingly. "Nice work, Agent O'Leary. Can you still make your plans this evening?"

"If I hurry."

"Then go. And thank you."

With a proud smile, O'Leary signed off. Her half of the monitor went dark.

Thornton came back from the cockpit. "We're ready. Did she find anything important?"

Casey's mind worked fast as he walked to the corner of the cabin where he had stashed his gear. "Doubtful, but I'm going to head down and check it out, just in case. I can drive to Laredo when it doesn't pan out." At Thornton's curious expression, Casey added, "Bartowski plans to be in Laredo until tomorrow evening, so I've got the time to check out O'Leary's lead. And between you and me, I wouldn't mind a stop-off in Austin. Great barbecue."

Thornton grinned. "Bring extra."

"Done." Casey slung his duffel over his shoulder and his coat over his arm. He headed for the door. "Call me when you're on the ground; you'll need to set up surveillance the minute you land. I want to be sure we get Bartowski before he gets anywhere near the border. Also, track every plane that comes into the Laredo airport. Be on the lookout for Agent Walker. She's in Los Angeles right now, but could leave for Laredo at any time."

"And if we find her?"

"Track her, but do not approach. Bartowski is the important one, and we may need her to lead us to him."

"Roger that."

Just inside the door, he grabbed two bottles of water from the wet bar and shoved them into a mesh pocket on the outside of the duffel. After a quick nod to Thornton, Casey descended the steps off the plane. As he walked away, the plane door shut behind him and the engines fired up, leaving Casey to trail Bartowski on his own. That was just the way Casey wanted things.

Bartowski had damn near pulled it off. He had made a single, subtle mistake of not laying any trails to the south. If not for that, Thornton, Hale, and Casey would be out chasing Bartowski's three decoy phones. Three agents would have been tied up, so Casey would have ordered O'Leary to stop watching the car rentals in favor of the other transportation methods.

He would never have had the brainstorm about a different phone message for Walker. He would never have learned about the car rental.

Casey would never have put the pieces together.

Walker was one of the best. If she managed to rendezvous with Bartowski in Laredo, the two were as good as gone. Now, that wasn't going to happen.

Bartowski had almost gotten away. Almost. But Casey knew about the rental car, so there was no way Bartowski was ever going to make it to Laredo, let alone his rendezvous with Agent Walker.


	14. Contact

_Author's note:_

_I'm intrigued that the negative reviews are almost always by anonymous users. That's a shame – the negative reviews are usually the more interesting and useful ones._

_Constructive criticism is one of the rewards from putting so much effort into this story. I want to know what people don't like as much as what they do, so feel free to tell me where you feel I'm going astray._

_Thanks again to Baylink for helping me out.  
_

* * *

Dominic's Westwind I was an older but immaculately kept plane. The walls of the cabin curved from ceiling to floor, a graceful union of form and function. A cleverly lit white ceiling provided the illusion of greater height over the three pairs of high-backed tawny leather chairs. From a seat in the middle row, Sarah stared out a window, listening to the intermingled drone of engines and rushing air. She tried to shake off the vague unease that had settled within her.

Things were working out as well as could be hoped. She had secured her anonymous plane ride out of Los Angeles. Dominic would make all the contact with flight control personnel, and his name would be on all the official documents. Even if somebody tracked him down, he would only have the fake contact information she had given him.

She was off the grid. Untraceable. Not even Graham knew where she was. On top of that, she was on her way to meet up with Chuck, who by some miracle still trusted her. Still, once she was on the plane she had no distractions, nowhere to hide from a difficult truth – she didn't have a clue what to do once she found him.

Protocol demanded that she notify Director Graham. He already suspected that he couldn't trust her; he had made that clear when he sent agents to spy on her and Casey. If she didn't report to him shortly after meeting Chuck, her career would be over.

If she did report in, Graham would make a call. Fulcrum was too close to let things go back to the way they were, so for the greater good, Chuck would be gone, either by bunker or bullet. The thought ripped her apart inside. Chuck had done nothing wrong, far from it, and his life would be over because he had trusted her.

But what was the alternative? Take Chuck into hiding? Neither of their lives would ever be the same. He would need to give up everything and everyone he loved so much. She would be throwing away her career to protect a national security asset, a deserving one, but one with knowledge as dangerous as it was powerful. If Fulcrum ever found him, the ramifications would be terrible for everyone, especially Chuck.

Nor could she trust her ability to make a rational decision. Her feelings were getting in the way, and she had no way to filter them out. Sarah cared for him, no doubt, but she had never had any kind of real relationship before. She had no way to know if this thing with Chuck could last. She had no way to know if she could make this work.

Back and forth she went. She had sworn to protect her country. She had promised Chuck she would protect him. She would be throwing away her career. She would be throwing away any chance with Chuck.

There was no good answer.

A call from the cockpit rescued her from her thoughts. "Come keep an old man company," Dominic said cheerfully.

Sarah wasn't entirely fond of the idea, but the distraction was welcome. She needed to stop thinking about Chuck for a while. Besides, it was the least she could do in return for forcing an old man to float the cost of a load of fuel without receiving a dime in return.

She navigated the narrow aisle leading to the cockpit. Dominic flashed her a wide smile, as contagious as one of Chuck's. She smiled in return as she slid into the co-pilot chair. She strapped on the seat belt out of habit.

"Thanks," Dominic said in his raspy voice. "These long flights get boring."

"Seems like an odd career choice if you don't like long flights."

"Oh, I'm just used to a little more excitement. I flew for the Navy for most of my career."

"You were a fighter pilot?"

"Helicopter, mostly. I started flying fixed-wing after my service was up."

She glanced back at Dominic's jacket where it hung from a hangar on a hook, skimming for more information. The panels held numerous decals and pins, some military, some commercial.

A pair of pins on the left lapel caught her eye. Emblazoned on one pin was a bright blue wolf, breathing crimson flame and holding a black trident. The second pin was almost identical, except the wolf was red. A shock ran through her body when she identified the emblems. "You were a Seawolf and a Red Wolf," she said.

He gave her a penetrating look. "And by the way you identified those crests, I'm thinking you're not your run-of-the-mill repo woman."

Sarah wanted to kick herself in disgust for making such a rookie mistake. "I don't like to talk about my past."

"I get that. There are days I'm not too fond of mine."

"Seems like you should be proud. There can't be many pilots that were both in both units."

"There weren't. Just a handful, a few of us who volunteered to help found the Red Wolves after Vietnam."

"You must have been good."

"One of the best." He said the words without a hint of ego, and oddly enough, like it was more a curse than a blessing. There was more there, far more than he was saying. She didn't press. It didn't seem right to open old wounds.

She looked at his jacket again. Conspicuously absent were any signs of the medals the US must have awarded him. Given how he talked about his past, the decals and pins on his jacket seemed nothing more than bumper stickers implying where he'd been and what he'd done. Only the specific locations were missing. Central America? Africa? Vietnam, for sure, and Vietnam alone was enough to leave most people scarred for life.

His fantastic smile ebbed but didn't disappear. It seemed nothing more than another faded decal, an echo of the man he used to be, slapped on out of habit to hide the emptiness beneath. Dominic was a man hard-used by life. Despite his service to his country, here he was, with nothing to show for it but his pins and his decals and his plane with the three missed payments. And now, his country was using him again, coming to back to take some of what little he had left, as if determined to make sure he had nothing left to give in the end.

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. "Knowing what you do now, would you do it all again?" she asked.

His smile brightened again, concealing the truth beneath. "Of course."

"Really?"

"I said I'd give my life for my country," he said. "In a way, I guess I did. Seems like it would be wrong of me to regret the deal now."

It was hard to argue the logic, but there was nothing logical about the way Dominic's life turned out. Only when it came time to reckon the account did the full price of the bargain become clear. In a way, it may have been fairer if a bullet had taken him on his last mission.

Neither Sarah nor Dominic liked talking about their pasts. Their futures didn't look much better. So they sat in the silence, grateful for the moment, where Dominic still had his plane and Chuck still was free and the hope still was there that somehow, some way, everything could still work out to the good.

* * *

Casey decided central Texas looked much more attractive at night. As darkness fell, all flaws were concealed. Long stems of grass looked the same blowing in the breeze, whether they were a sun-parched brown or a verdant green. Ramshackle buildings, once thriving because of their proximity to the highway and now abandoned because of it, regained a semblance of their former selves when seen as back-lit silhouettes. Things certainly seemed more attractive, but that may have simply been indicative of a shift in his mood now that Bartowski was in his sights.

Tracking Bartowski had been a trivial matter. Rental cars were all equipped with GPS tracking systems. It wasn't particularly difficult to disconnect the trackers, but if you did, the security company paid to watch the car would put out a BOLO for both the car and its registered drivers. Chuck couldn't afford that. So, once Casey's team penetrated Bartowski's smokescreen of false trails, Casey had a perfect read on where Bartowski really was.

According to the tracking app on Casey's phone, Bartowski had been roughly fifty minutes ahead when Casey left the airport. He had slalomed through the post-rush-hour traffic, figuring he would shrink the gap between them quickly enough. Bartowski had to be careful not to attract attention, so he couldn't drive much more than seven or eight miles per hour over the speed limit. Casey had a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of his NSA badge.

His thinking proved fairly accurate. He had made up twenty minutes in the first hour, but only ten in the second, largely because he got pulled over twice, including one local sheriff who would be lucky to have his job the next day. Still, the gap was closing quickly enough.

Just north of Austin, Casey's other advantage kicked in. Chuck had stopped to get something to eat. Casey had no such need – Fulcrum had inadvertently seen to that. He might, however, need to stop and pick up some lotion and a big bottle of water. The sides of his neck and the middle of his back were starting to itch, and he had been unable to slake his thirst with the bottles of water from the plane. The side effects of the poison were getting worse.

That wasn't Casey's only concern. Truth be told, while Casey was looking forward to capturing Bartowski, he wasn't sure what to do next. It was one thing to steal a confidential file from an NSA cabinet. It would be another to let Fulcrum try to extract the Intersect from Bartowski's head, and while Casey wasn't familiar with the particulars, it had to be an unpleasant process. Killing Bartowski would be a kindness.

Still, what was one man's life in the scheme of things? Pentagon decisions, by necessity, were based on cost-benefit analyses and statistical projections. The goal was always to minimize – not eliminate, but minimize – collateral damage. If Beckman knew that killing Bartowski would result in successful completion of a significant mission, she would do it in a heartbeat. And that's what Fulcrum was promising Casey. Turn over Bartowski, get the antidote, and start completing missions that made a difference again.

The miles ticked away, and Casey was still no closer to a good answer. An answer would need to wait. The rental car was parked just ahead.

On the west side of the highway, an island of light appeared in the semi-gloom. A flat red-and-white roof covered several rows of gas pumps, some empty, the rest replenishing fuel for an assortment of vehicles, everything from a motorcycle to a thirty-foot RV. Behind the gas pump was a broad well-lit building. Neon signs indicated a cafeteria, a central area for truckers, and a mini-mart easily large enough to belie the "mini" appellation. A second, taller red-and-white roof protected a set of pumps reserved for eighteen wheelers on the back side of the building.

Casey took the next exit. He directed the car up the small hill and, after a rolling stop at the intersection, took a hard right onto the frontage road. A hundred feet later, he swung into the truck stop parking lot. He wove between a car and a couple of people to slot his car next to the rental, a small red subcompact with a Superior rental company logo on the rear bumper.

Time to end the hunt.

He got out, briefly surveying the parking lot before shutting the car door and heading inside. The nearest door led towards the cafeteria area, separated from the rest of the complex by tall wooden planters done in dark wood to match the tabletops and chairs. The place had a homey feel to it, from a breakfast bar area with stools fixed to the floor to the rotating dessert refrigerator at one end of the counter. Tempting as the desserts looked, Casey wouldn't have had an appetite for the huge portions of pudding or pie even if Bartowski weren't here.

Casey frowned. Actually, Bartowski wasn't here. He scanned the tables, looking for a telltale set of dishes for a patron who might have left to hit the head. The tables were mostly clean and empty; only a few that were actively in use. He was about to turn and start searching the rest of the building when a face caught his eye. Along the back wall, Mei-Ling Cho sat at a two-seat table, watching him, waiting to be noticed.

Deep inside Casey, a low rumbling began, slowly spilling out of him as his face twisted into a sneer. His knuckles cracked as his fingers tightened into fists. Casey had been hoodwinked. Again.

The whole pattern became clear, only now that it was too late. Casey had expected to find mistakes, so Bartowski created some to be found, first with the Herder, then with the false trail to Stanford. Once Casey had learned that Chuck wasn't going to make an obvious mistake, Bartowski had created subtler ones. The lack of trails heading south from Dallas. The credit card subterfuge. The rental car. He had played on Casey's prejudices, knowing that he expected Chuck to be alone and to panic. Instead, Bartowski had recruited help and worked methodically.

From the start, Bartowski had played on Casey's prejudices, and Casey had swallowed every piece of bait whole. Now Bartowski could be anywhere.

Slowly, deliberately, Casey unclenched his hands. "She may have information about Bartowski," he said to himself. "I can wrap my hands around his scrawny neck sooner if I get some information." He repeated the sentences three more times, as if they were mantras, and then walked across the restaurant to Cho's table.

"Agent Casey," she said. Her accent made her English thick and slow. "You seem … irritated."

"Miss Cho. Didn't think I'd see you again, unless your sewing circle happened to be harboring members of a sleeper cell."

"What is a 'sewing circle'?"

"It's … never mind." This just wasn't his day.

"Please sit down."

He warily cocked his head to one side. "You're not going to try anything rash, are you?"

"Do you really think Chuck would ask me to do something to you?"

"No, but you might take matters into your own hands."

"I am here to repay my debt to him. That means I will honor his wishes – as long as *you* do not try anything rash."

Casey was too worn out to spar any more, so he decided to take Cho at her word. He pivoted above the chair opposite her and lowered himself down carefully. "I don't suppose you're going to tell me where he is," he said.

"No, those are not my instructions."

"So what are your instructions?"

"Chuck wanted me to tell you that he is sorry, but that you left him no choice."

Casey couldn't argue that.

She said, "He also wanted me to thank you."

"For what?"

"For protecting him. For all that you taught him. For the confidence you gave him."

He started to growl, but stopped. Coming from a regular agent, pointing out that Casey's own teachings had been used against him would have been a grave insult. But this wasn't a regular agent. This was Bartowski, and he didn't do that kind of thing. Casey couldn't help but be a little proud of how far Bartowski had come.

Casey asked, "How else did you help him?"

"I am not at liberty to say."

"By not telling me, you are aiding and abetting a fugitive."

"So you claim. I could just be here for the pie."

"I could run you in."

"To what end?"

"To get the information you have."

"First, you would need to subdue me, which given your tired state seems unlikely. Even if you win, you would then need to deal with the aftermath of the fight in a very public venue. Then, you would need to successfully torture me."

"Everybody talks."

"Yes, but not right away. The trail would be cold by the time you got anything of use. I do not believe it prudent strategy to torture what little I know from me."

"But it might cheer me up."

"You would need to explain to your superiors why you tortured a key Chinese defector. It would be career suicide."

"Well, you're certainly an expert on that subject."

She looked taken aback. She recovered quickly. "I served my country well until my country did not serve me."

"You threw away a career to rescue one person."

"That one person is my brother. He did not deserve to die because of who I am."

Casey pressed. "You made a choice to serve your country. When you took the job, you knew the risks. Not only did you end your career, but you turned traitor."

"My country turned traitor first!" With a great deal of effort, she composed herself, looking around to make sure her outburst hadn't attracted undue attention. One customer in a flannel shirt and a trucker's cap glanced their way, but continuing to watch her and Casey seemed to demand too much energy, and his head dropped back down.

Reassured, she said, "I warned them for a week that my brother was in danger, and they chose to do nothing. After he was taken, they chose to do nothing. Their choice, not mine."

"What were they supposed to do? Trade the TRIAD prisoner for your brother? He is just one person."

"Just one person? Really?" She eyed him curiously. "Tell me, Agent Casey. Do you believe it makes you noble to be willing to write off somebody you care about?"

"I believe it makes me a better agent."

"Then you truly have given up everything in service of your country."

He smiled a little smile. "Funny – that doesn't sound like a compliment."

"If there is no line you will not cross, you are nothing but an unthinking weapon."

"If you mean I follow orders, then yes, you are correct."

"And what happens when you must make a call in the field?"

"I assess the relative strategic values of the options, and choose accordingly."

She leaned in. "So you have never made a decision in the field based on something other than the mission parameters?"

Casey's eyes widened. He could tell from her coy tone that she knew. Somehow, she knew about Belarus. She knew about the mission gone bad, and the little girl, and the way Casey had taken matters into his own hands, to the detriment of the mission and his career.

Approval and even a bit of warmth crept into her countenance. Both looked strange on her. "Do not be so quick to judge others," she said. "And do not be so harsh on yourself. Distancing yourself from your job is often necessary, but there are no absolutes. We are better when there are lines we will not cross, and better still when there are things that will compel us to act counter to our duty, no matter what the consequences."

With that, she stood up and gave him a parting smile. She left him at the table, hunched over and deep in thought.

She strode between two rows of well-worn tables and then pushed through an aluminum-framed glass door into the cooling night air. Out of habit, she checked her surroundings. The highway was across the road and down a slope, far enough away that the noise of traffic wasn't enough to muffle the sounds of three kids screaming delightedly in the back of a family SUV, or the couple having a mild argument two pumps over.

She glanced back over her shoulder, partly to check her six, partly because of a thought. Casey had familiar purplish lines on his neck. He had been poisoned.

The lines were indicative of an insidious technique called "The Spider's Kiss". By placing the poison into a suspension, an injection turned viscous when it mixed with the moisture in the human body. The outer layers gradually broke away to spread through the body, discoloring arteries and veins further and further from the source as time passed. Depending on where the injection was made, this created either a series of dark purplish lines vaguely resembling a spider's web or a circle with the long lines extending, looking like a spider with long legs. Eventually, enough poison reached the heart or brain to kill the victim.

The lines had begun to appear on Casey's neck. Because he had made no effort to conceal them, he must be unaware that they were showing. She couldn't know whether he even knew about the poison, but really, that was a moot point. She would have had no way to share anything she learned with Chuck.

Chuck had refused to leave Mei-Ling any way to contact him, as he felt that was information that was worth torturing for. It was a strange place to draw the line, as she knew the names on the false credentials she had supplied him, but she had respected his wishes. It was, after all, his operation, and his life at risk.

A semi roared past towards the back side of the truck stop. Mei-Ling followed it around the outside of the building. She had to leave Chuck's car here; the car had been parked here for a long time now, and there could be others following the GPS tracker. It wouldn't take too long before she found a Dallas-bound truck to get her home, back to the life she had willingly accepted in exchange for keeping her brother alive.

* * *

Inside the truck stop, Casey's phone rang. As much as he didn't want to take the call, he had no choice. An agent didn't let a general's call roll to voice mail unless he had a damn good reason.

"Casey here."

"Report," General Beckman said.

"We still believe Bartowski is heading for Laredo. The lead O'Leary found proved negative, as feared." What he said was consistent with his last report, but at this point barely resembled the truth. Casey was walking a dangerous road. He wasn't even sure he could keep fashioning lies to support his story if the general asked any more questions.

Luckily, her mind was elsewhere. Or, as it turned out, not so luckily. "Major Casey, your orders have changed. Should you or any member of your team encounter Chuck Bartowski, you are hereby authorized to kill him, without hesitation, in whatever manner proves expedient. Director Graham has been apprised and is relaying similar commands to his agents."

Casey had known it was coming, not exactly at that moment, but sometime soon. Still, hearing the actual words caused his breath to catch. Conflicting emotions shot through him. Bartowski had done nothing but serve honorably. He was only one man. If Bartowski died, Casey wouldn't get the antidote. The DNI would lose their only Intersect. Fulcrum would be hurt. Strategically, it made sense. But a good man would die.

"Major Casey, are you there?"

He swallowed his feelings. "Yes, ma'am. Order confirmed. Bartowski will be terminated if encountered."

"Good. And Major, be sure to keep an eye on Agent Walker. She might not take the news as well as you did."

* * *

Sarah perched on one knee outside a hotel room door, pretending to fumble with something in her bag. A device resembling a credit card with a black plastic bar along one side jutted out of the card lock. A series of LEDs flipped from red to green as the device automatically found the code to the lock.

Her hand, holding her gun, emerged from her bag as the other found the door handle. The last LEDs turned green; the door lock clicked. Carefully, slowly, she twisted the handle and eased the door slightly open into the dark room. A self-closing hinge pushed the door back against her hand. She braced herself in case an attack came. None did.

She propped the door open with her toe. In one smooth motion, she retrieved the access card, dropped it into her bag and zipped the pocket shut. After one last glance up and down the deserted hallway, she kicked the door off the wall behind, planting a foot to catch it when it automatically swung back. Her gun sighted the bathroom door to the right, straight down the short entry hall, then the corner of the entry hall and the wall she couldn't see.

Heavy curtains mostly covered a bank of windows on the opposite wall. The slivers of security lights slinking in around the edges betrayed no assailants waiting in the dark. Her ears scanned the silence for any indication that she was not alone. It was difficult to hear any subtle sounds over the waterfall in the distance, but her sensitive ears picked up nothing unusual.

A quick motion later her heavy bag had replaced her foot as a door prop and she was standing, still covering the likely points of attack. Three sidesteps and a kick of her foot later, she and her bag were inside the room. The door swung shut behind her, noiseless except for a slight squeak of a hinge and the click of the lock.

She relaxed slightly and flipped on the lights. Still nobody. The only clue anyone had been there recently was Chuck's duffel, unzipped but still mostly full, sitting on an angle on a table in the corner. She was definitely in the right room, but Chuck wasn't there. Frustrating.

More to keep herself occupied than anything else, she finished a sweep of the room, gun in hand. Fake headboards mounted on the wall framed two unused double beds covered in chintzy orange-and-red-patterned bedspreads. The room smelled faintly of stale smoke and something else that was probably left unknown. The nightstand held a land-line phone and a cheap alarm clock; it emitted a whir and a click as a fake digital number flipped down to mark the passing of a minute. A quick peek through the stained curtains revealed a ten-foot drop to some nearby bushes, useful if an escape route was needed.

She went to the bathroom and flipped on the light. The functional room had standard, if worn, fixtures. A plastic shower curtain was pushed to the back of the chipped tub. The hotel towels, permanently greyed from too many uses, were still neatly folded, save for a wet washcloth hanging from a hook on the wall. A bag with Chuck's toiletries sat open on the white faux marble countertop. His toothbrush rested nub-side down in a small plastic cup.

After sticking the gun in the waistband of her pants, Sarah left the bathroom and retrieved her bag from the entryway. As she brought the bag deeper into the room, she noticed something on the table she'd overlooked before. She set her bag on the foot of the bed closest to the window, then went to the table to afford her a better look.

On the table sat a small clear plastic box with a grocery story label affixed to the opened lid. The box held a small, strikingly familiar cupcake with dark brown frosting and a 'Happy Birthday' spelled out in pink lettering. An opened box of candles sat next to a half-used tube of pink icing, its bottom rolled up like a tube of toothpaste. Without thinking about it, she went to her bag to pull out Chuck's birthday card. She turned back and held up the card to compare the image to the cake. It would be nearly a perfect replica, once the stubby white candles were lit and the paper cupcake liner was removed. He clearly had harbored no doubts that she would figure out his clues.

Sarah had shared her birthday with Chuck when she made it the code to the vault. February 18, 1982. Chuck had played off that code in his note to her, planting key words in the second, eighteenth and eighty-second positions.

02.18. 82.

'American'. 'Falls'. 'Days'.

American Falls obviously pointed to Niagara Falls, but it had taken a bit of guesswork to figure out that "days" pointed to the name of the hotel: the Days Inn. Once she arrived, she sweet-talked the desk clerk into looking at the registry. Sure enough, she found Morgan Grimes – in room 218. Or, 0218.

He had hidden the clues where only she would find them, where only she could decipher them, using something real the two of them had shared. She was the only one who knew where he was, the only one he had trusted.

Sarah heard footsteps in the hall outside. The emotions coursing through her system stunted her reactions. It took the sound of the door lock clicking open for her to move. She spun, the birthday card fluttering to the floor a few feet away as she pulled her gun from her waistband.

The door swung inwards. Chuck didn't even check the room; he was too occupied with shutting and locking the door while managing a small plastic grocery bag. After sliding the key card into a back pocket, he turned. He pulled up after two steps when he finally realized he wasn't alone.

His weary eyes took in everything and put the pieces together. "Sorry," he said with a wry smile. "I forgot matches, and it's really not cake without ice cream."

Sarah didn't respond. She couldn't respond. She stood frozen.

Chuck set the bag next to the television. He looked at her and the gun curiously. "You going to put that down?"

"I can't do that."

He let out a small laugh. "Why not?"

"Fulcrum knows who you are, so Director Graham put out a kill order on you."

"And?" he asked, his face whitening.

She sighted him a bit more carefully. "And I'm here to carry it out."


	15. Agent Walker

Since Chuck had uploaded the Intersect, people had pointed guns at him far more often than he cared to remember. It was a far different experience when Sarah was the one sighting him down the barrel.

Sarah had always displayed a certain level of humanity around him, even under the most extreme of circumstances. The woman pointing the gun at his head did not. This woman was efficient and ruthless and cruelly beautiful. This woman could poison French diplomats, or infiltrate paramilitary camps, or assassinate visiting dignitaries without a second thought.

This woman was a stranger.

In a brittle, hollow voice, he said, "Tell me, Agent Walker: is this what ends up happening to everyone you get to trust you?"

It was frightening how completely unaffected she was. She just stood there, a strangely empty smile on her face, pointing her gun straight at his chest. Unmoving. Unwavering. Constant as the North Star. Just not the way he had thought.

He asked, "How can you do this?"

"I thought you'd prefer to have me carry out the order rather than somebody else."

"That's considerate of you, but I'd really prefer it if nobody kills me."

She said, "Unfortunately, that isn't an option."

"Sure it is. You put the gun down without firing it. Seems like a perfectly good option to me."

"We appreciate your service to your country but if you fell into the wrong hands, the consequences would be devastating. I'm sorry."

Thing was, she didn't sound sorry.

He said, "So I'm no longer an asset. Guess that makes me a liability. I'm just another number to be balanced in Graham's ledger."

"Something like that."

His face darkened. "After all I've done for Graham, this is how it ends?"

"I guess so."

"And after all that we've been through, you and I, this is how it ends?"

No response. None. Just icy blue eyes staring over cold steel.

He stared back at her. "I don't get it. How can you stand there and point your gun at me, as if I was just another random faceless terrorist instead of a guy who, up until earlier today, helped you fight them?"

"It's nothing personal."

"It's pretty personal to me."

She said, "The job always comes first. I told you that."

"Then you told me the job wouldn't always come first."

"This isn't one of those times."

"Well, it damn well should be."

If anything, her stance strengthened and her aim tightened. More vicious. Less Sarah.

"You know, I thought I did everything right," Chuck said. "Fulcrum keeps growing more and more powerful, Beckman and Graham keep growing more and more paranoid, and the data in my head keep growing more and more stale. I'd always been afraid that the end game for me was getting poked and prodded in a lab in some underground bunker, but the watch was a wake-up call. It crystallized things. The end game could be a fake heart attack or a bullet in my back or poison in my coffee, and if Ellie or Awesome or Morgan ever happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, their lives would be in danger too.

"So I left. I left and I tried to take everyone dangerous with me. I sent Casey and Fulcrum chasing shadows to Seattle and Stanford and Texas and anywhere else I could think of. But you, Sarah, you I trusted."

He laughed, a bitter, lifeless sound. "It's ironic. I thought I'd make a lot of mistakes when I ran, but it turns out I made only one. The only mistake I made was trusting you."

He heard his heart breaking in his words. He thought that, at least, might provoke some reaction. The Sarah he knew would have shown some small sign of remorse. But not Agent Walker. She didn't twitch a muscle. She just stood there, in her sensible white blouse and her sensible pony tail, doing the incomprehensible.

He grasped for something, anything, to fill the emptiness inside of him. "Tell me I was at least right about the watch. Tell me you didn't plant the chip."

"What makes you think I didn't?" she asked.

"It wouldn't make sense. You spent months gaining my trust, and if I ever found the chip, I would never trust you again. Besides, if you really wanted to kill me, you could get me alone easily enough. So that means Casey planted it. It gave him a tracker and a way to execute a kill order, and if I found it, he'd figure that I'd blame you."

The corner of her mouth turned up slightly more, just for an instant. It was easily the oddest gesture of respect he had ever received. "Nicely done, Chuck."

"Guess I picked up a few things from you guys. Not enough, apparently."

There wasn't much she could say to that.

He stared at the hollow of her neck, where the pendant of her necklace usually rested. No longer. "Casey was trying to convince me that I shouldn't trust you. I never dreamed he could be right."

She bit her lower lip, something he'd never seen her do before. Then that strangely empty smile was back. "I guess some lessons are harder than others."

Unreal. Chuck had been deceived by the CIA's best, and what a number she had done on him. As they talked about killing him, she was utterly devoid of anything resembling emotion. Every last vestige of humanity was gone, replaced by an apathy so profound that, for Chuck, it bordered on malice.

Did she have to be so callous about it all? Did she have to strip everything away before she killed him.

The answer ran though him like a shock. No. She didn't.

Why hadn't she pulled the trigger already? Unless...

He appraised her through new eyes, eyes that gleamed with the slightest bit of hope. "So all of it was a lie?" he asked.

"Yes."

"The supposed attraction behind our cover? Kissing me in front of Bryce's cryochamber? Crying on the helipad when they were going to take me away, coming to my place on Valentine's Day, telling me you wanted what time we could have together? All of it was nothing but lies?"

"Yes!"

It didn't fit. Sarah was sympathetic. Agent Walker was pragmatic. Neither was cruel enough to drag things out like this.

He looked down at the floor and saw the two-dollar birthday card lying on the matted shag carpet. Everything became clear. The hurt drained out of him.

His gaze turned back to her. Softly, he said, "You and I – it wasn't lies, was it."

"It was, Chuck," she said. "I'm sorry, but–"

"You're lying now."

Her head twisted to one side. She searched for a rebuttal, and failed to find one.

It was Chuck's turn to be calm, just a warm calm instead of cold. "Why did you bring the card?" he asked.

"What?"

"Why did you bring the birthday card? You didn't need it."

She said, "The card told me where you were."

"No, the note inside the card told you where I was. I can see why you'd bring the note. You didn't need to bring the card."

Her eyes swung away and back. "I might have needed it to get you into the room."

"Then why did you pull it out after you got here? After you got the order?"

Sarah squirmed. She didn't have a clever answer for that. At least, not one she wanted to give.

"You brought it out when you saw the cake," Chuck said. "Yesterday was your birthday. The cake, the card, the clues I left for you and only you – all of it meant something to you."

"You're wrong."

"I don't believe you."

Her aim drifted the slightest bit. She readjusted and rallied. "Of course I lied to you, Chuck. I'm a CIA agent. I handled you. I did what was necessary so you would trust me, and look where you ended up." She almost managed a sneer. Almost. The way it came out, it was more like she was imploring him to believe her.

And he didn't. "Yes, you lied to me. You've lied to me from the moment we met. You lied about being new in town, and how you wanted me to call. When you said you didn't date Bryce. When you said you didn't want to go out with me. You lied to me under the influence of truth serum, for crying out loud. And you're lying to me now. You don't want to shoot me."

The almost-sneer faded. She struggled to keep the gun level. Little cracks formed at the seams, tiny fissures where bits of Sarah seeped out, bits like the sudden glimmer of moisture in her eyes, or the escape of a trembling breath.

He took a slow step forward. She started slightly, but otherwise didn't react.

He took another step. "Don't come any closer, Chuck," she said. He didn't listen. He took another step.

Cautiously, inexorably, he closed in. Her face cried out in denial, but she was powerless to stop him. His hands reached for the gun. Her lips parted in a protest that died on her lips.

He could have turned the gun aside easily enough, but he didn't. Indecision wasn't enough. She had to be the one to make the choice. He could plead his case, but he couldn't make the choice for her.

His hands wrapped around the barrel. Instead of diverting her aim, he steadied it, pointing the gun straight at his heart. Her eyes grew wide.

"This isn't you, Sarah," he said. "As much as I'm amazed at how you can be whoever is needed to serve your country, this isn't who you are. And this isn't what you want."

"Why don't you get it?" she asked. "What I want has nothing to do with it."

"It has everything to do with it."

"I. Am. An. Agent."

"No. You're Sarah. You're my Sarah."

Her face screwed up in anguish. She shook her head again. Chuck wasn't sure whether it was to tell him 'no' or to fight off the urge to shoot.

"Chuck…" she begged, a plea for something to tip the scales, to break the stalemate that was ripping her apart inside. All she had to do was pull the trigger, and it would finish her mission. It would finish him. It would finish both of them.

And he smiled.

He said, "My life has been in your hands since the day we met. I don't see why that should change now." With the gentlest voice he had, he added, "I trust you, Sarah. Just like you asked me to. Even now, I trust you."

Her face went flat, disturbingly so. All the emotion that he had seen in her face evaporated, and for a long moment, nothing happened. Then she began to tremble, and her mask suddenly vanished, ripped away as the conflict swelled within her. She looked at the gun and at him and at what could happen next. With a strangled cry, she yanked the gun away from him. The gun dislodged from her suddenly graceless hands, cart-wheeling across the carpet. It settled on the floor next to the birthday card, the barrel pointed impotently at the wall.

* * *

The gun flew away from her in slow motion. As it tumbled to a halt, Sarah's body shuddered under the weight of the emotions. What had she just done? What had she nearly done?

She stared with wild eyes at Chuck, standing so close he could probably feel her ragged breaths on his skin. "How could you do that?" she demanded, almost angrily. "How could you possibly trust me after all the lies?"

He shrugged, a motion more appropriate for expressing indifference between a choice of restaurants. "I'd almost forgotten," he said. "With you, it's never about the words. Your actions are what matter, and everything you did told me that you didn't want to kill me. You just hadn't quite figured it out yet."

The answer floored her. She had come to the hotel in full-blown mission mode, completely intent on killing him, and yet somehow he had still figured out the truth, a truth that she hadn't even recognized. But that was what Chuck did. He saw things in her nobody else could see.

She looked around as if seeing the dingy hotel room for the first time. Her plan was to kill him and then disappear. Now … now there was no plan.

"So what do we do now?" she asked. "Do we go on the run for the rest of our lives?" As if the running was nothing, but the rest-of-our-lives was terrifying.

Chuck took a moment, choosing his words carefully. "Nothing's changed, Sarah. I want what time we can have together. I'm not asking for the rest of our lives; I'm just asking for one more day. Maybe tomorrow one of us changes his mind. Or maybe, we wake up one day and we're eighty, holding hands on a porch and thinking back on our life together. I don't know about happily ever after. I don't want to know. Right now, I just want one more day, and we can figure it out from there."

Deep inside her, something shifted. Something subtle. Something profound.

Maybe nothing had changed for Chuck, but for Sarah, everything had changed. Chuck's words had made the impossible plausible, reasonable, almost simple. He had turned her own rules about what could and couldn't be around on her, showing her a way that maybe, just maybe, they could have a future.

Before, there had been so much in the way, so many reasons to keep Chuck at arm's length. But now those reasons were gone. She had thrown them all aside when she threw down her gun.

A quick step later, her fingers were on his neck, drawing his mouth to hers as she rose up on her toes. Hungrily, she kissed him, clinging to him, pulling herself back from the depths on the strength of his faith in her.

There wasn't anything to keep them apart. Not anymore.

At least for one more day.

* * *

_End of part one._

* * *

_Author's note: thanks for the reviews on the last chapter. I reached out to a couple of people and had some interesting discussions about what they didn't like about the last chapter. Like I said, the negative reviews are often more interesting, even though I reserve the right to disagree and argue my case._

_Big thanks to Baylink for all his beta help. He probably doesn't recognize parts of this chapter, as I made a few substantial changes behind his back. He's probably used to that by now. All mistakes are my own._

_My schedule from here – I probably won't be publishing for at least a week or so. I've got some serious writing to do before I can get the next chapter up, and this week promises to be busy for me outside of writing. Hopefully, though, people will be happy with where I left things._

_- sharp_


	16. Part II  Prelude

_**Tuesday night, 10:43 PM EST, approximately the same time Chuck and Sarah met at the hotel**_

CIA Director Langston Graham liked working late at night. It suited him. The building was quiet and his calendar was clear, and while half a world a way it was daytime and things of note were happening, here he could attack his work without distraction.

Also, on nights like tonight, he could turn out the lights and stare out his window, with a glass of bourbon in his hand to take the sting out of what he had to do next.

His eyes roamed the rooftops. In the distance, the Capitol stood out, taller and more brightly lit than the intervening buildings. Tomorrow Congress would reconvene and continue their debates as if the fate of the free world depended upon their grandstanding and posturing. But while Graham respected the debates and what they stood for, he knew the most important battles were fought behind closed doors, out of the public eye.

Graham took a long drink. The amber liquid burned his lips, his tongue, his throat. It was time.

He rolled his chair closer to his L-shaped desk and clicked a trio of small buttons, each tap of his finger turning on a set of lights around the room. After stealing one last sip from his glass, he set it on the desk pad so he could pick up his phone receiver and dial an internal number. "Fifteen minutes," he said to the answering voice, and then he set the receiver back into its cradle.

Satisfied, he pushed the intercom button on his phone. "Jeanine, would you come in here please?"

"Yes, Director."

Graham released the button and tilted back in his chair. A moment later, the door to his office opened. Jeanine Hadley entered, wearing her trademark chignon bun in her hair and a form-fitting black skirt so long it might as well have been a pair of pants. Her stern outfit couldn't hide her unconscious grace as she closed the door and crossed to her favored spot halfway across the room, clasping her hands in front of her as she waited for his instructions.

For nearly ten years Jeanine had been his assistant, ever since he had been forced out of the field by a leg injury and become an assistant deputy director. As he had climbed the ranks, he had brought her along, both because she was terrific at her job and because she had been the wife of his old partner. Greg Hadley had been one of the CIA's best. His death had hit both Jeanine and Langston hard.

"Thank you for working late," he said.

"I know it's important, Director."

His eyes inspected her. Nothing. There was nothing there, no sign he should have caught, no tell to give her away.

There was no hint of her betrayal.

As quietly as his low rumbling voice allowed, he asked, "Why, Jeanine?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I know that you've been passing information to Fulcrum."

A long moment passed. At first her expression was static. Then, her lips pursed and her eyes turned flinty. "Good," she said. She couldn't have made the word more hateful if she had spit on the carpet.

Her vitriol took him aback. He had expected protests, denials, maybe even pleas for forgiveness. Instead, Jeanine stood in the middle of his office, pulling the bobby pins from her bun and shaking out her coarse brown hair as if just getting home after a long day.

Still, her underlying bitterness gave him hope. He needed answers. If properly provoked, she might provide them. "Why did you do it?"

After her arms finished tousling her freed hair, they settled at her sides. Her gaze settled on him.

He said, "If this is about Greg–"

"Of course it's about Greg." Her lips pressed together in self-recrimination.

Graham studied her. Greg's death was six years ago, but she was as angry as if it had just happened. She wanted to talk. He just needed to push the right buttons. "You blame me for Greg's death?" he asked. "You've worked for me for a long time, long enough to know that sometimes agents don't return from missions."

"I've worked for you long enough to know when you're fishing for information."

"Was it because he came out of retirement for the mission?"

He gave her a moment to respond. She stood in stony silence.

"Were you just jealous? Did it bother you that he still put his country before you?"

Her eyes fixed on something over his shoulder.

He leaned forward. "You know, many people would call what he did noble, and call your anger misplaced, maybe even a little selfish."

There was no change in her facial expression, no shift in her breathing patterns.

Time to change gears. "I know you don't want to hear this, but Greg's return to the field was inevitable.

That got her attention. Her eyes flared as they fixed on him again.

"If I hadn't offered him that particular mission, he'd have come to me for one eventually."

"You don't know that!" she said.

"Actually, I do. I've seen it more times than I can count. Agents can't just flip a switch and stop being agents. After a few years on the job, the need for excitement, intrigue, even danger becomes ingrained in them. It gets into their blood. Many agents try to quit the field, but they always come back if they have the choice. Greg was no different. All I did was give him a push."

Her face twisted, agonized. Twice she started to say something and stopped, only to resume the fight with herself, a battle she was clearly losing.

Graham suppressed a grin as he watched her will crumble. He had her. She just didn't know it yet.

After another minute or so of vacillating, she caved. She said, "About a week before Greg left, the two of you had an argument in our home. What was that about?"

"That was between him and me."

"Our study isn't soundproofed quite as well as your office. I heard enough to know that Greg didn't want to go."

"I won't deny that I put pressure on Greg to come back. That's my job. But it was always his choice."

Jeanine strode across the room, parallel to the front of his desk, glancing sideways at him as if she was an attorney cross-examining a witness. She had given up all pretenses of keeping quiet and instead was starting to work towards something, probably some dream scenario she had played out in her head a hundred times. He would go along with it for now. Anything to keep her talking.

"Why Greg?" she said. "Why not somebody else?"

"Greg was the best agent for the job."

"Somebody younger wouldn't have been better? Maybe somebody who hadn't been out of the field for three months?

"No. I needed Greg. He gave us the best chance of success. I thought he could pull it off."

Jeanine stopped. In a voice quiet as distant thunder, she said, "I read the mission file, Langston."

"How did you..." He stopped himself. Of course she would have found a way to read the file, even though he classified the report far above her clearance. She knew enough people at the agency to make it happen. Hell, Fulcrum might have made certain the file landed on her desk. A foolish mistake, in hindsight.

She turned towards him. "I read why you selected Greg. You didn't want him because he gave you the best chance of success. You wanted him because he minimized the consequences of failure."

"Minimizing risk is just as important as maximizing reward. Sometimes it's more important."

"Odds of success: twenty-nine percent. Odds of survival: forty-six percent. Those were your calculations, Langston. Sending Greg on the mission doesn't strike me as an exercise in minimizing risk. In fact, sending him seems pretty damned cold-hearted."

He matched the intensity of her glare with his own. "I don't have the luxury of being sentimental. Yes, the mission was a long-shot, but the potential upside was enormous. I needed Greg, retired or not, so I tapped him for the mission, and he agreed. If you don't like the decision he made, that's between you and him, not you and me."

"Except that you never told him the whole story. You never told him the truth about why you selected him for the mission. And since Greg can't be here to call you on that, this is very much between you and me."

Graham said nothing for a long moment, and then shrugged. "What do you want from me, Jeanine? Nothing I can say will bring Greg back, and even if I were given a chance to do it over again, I would do it the same way. My decisions don't just affect a single agent; they affect hundreds of agents, so I do things by the numbers."

She circled towards the open end of the L-shaped desk. "I know. You do things by the numbers. The problem is, the numbers as you presented them said to scrub the mission. You sent Greg anyway. So what I want is to hear you say what the mission file doesn't. Tell me what was written between the lines. Tell me what you didn't tell my husband."

Damnit. He had tried to steer things away from this.

Her shoes whispered in the carpet with each slow step. "I'm surprised. It can't be that difficult to say the words. Not for somebody who doesn't have the luxury of being sentimental. Not for somebody who is only concerned with numbers."

A sickened feeling, very faint but undeniably there, crept into his stomach. He had become so adept at suppressing guilt that he had almost forgotten what it felt like.

"I already know. I just want to hear it from you." She stopped to one side of him. She spun the chair so he faced her, and leaned down, resting her fists on the chair. "Tell me, Langston. Tell me what you didn't tell Greg."

On some rational level, Graham knew there was a reasonable explanation. Graham's job was to protect the country, to do the best he could with what he had. If that meant sending an agent in the twilight of his career on a long-shot mission, that's what Graham did. But with her standing next to him, looking down at him, he couldn't seem to justify it.

Her knowing smirk was tinged with disdain. "That's what I thought." She stood up, turned and walked away.

The words erupted from him. "It was all he had left to give," he said to her back.

She froze. She balled a fist so tightly that she actually winced. Slowly, so slowly, she relaxed her hand with a relieved sigh and turned to face him. "That's right. Even the best agents didn't stand a much better chance of succeeding, so the only way to get the mission approved was to reduce the potential cost to nothing. That meant an agent no longer with the agency. Sending Greg was like playing with house money. If he succeeded, it's a big win. And if he died, the CIA didn't lose a thing. Is that about right?"

Graham didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.

"You feckless thug," she said. "Greg was your partner, your friend. He gave twenty years to the CIA, and when he retired, you told him that you respected his decision. But you didn't. You couldn't help yourself. After all the sacrifices he made, after all the two of you had been through, rather than letting him have his retirement, you had to keep taking until he had nothing left."

He shoved his guilt aside. "Enough. I need to know everything you told Fulcrum."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Director."

"If you think I was heartless about your husband, what do you think I'll do to you?"

She ignored him. She stared vacantly at the base of his desk and started to hum tunelessly. He frowned at the odd behavior. He really didn't want to order the torture of his admin to find out what she knew, but he was running out of options, and time wasn't on his side.

A respectful knock pulled his eyes away from her. "Come," he said. The door opened. Two agents in dark suits loomed in the doorway, a brown-haired man with a mustache and a woman of Middle Eastern decent. Graham simply nodded. The agents came over and stood on either side of Jeanine.

He said, "You got a lot of good agents killed."

Her eyes flicked up to him. "So did you."

Jeanine drew herself up to her full height, her body swaying unsteadily. Beads of sweat clung to her forehead. Her eyes lost focus; she squinted, trying to see Graham, and then giggled.

Something was wrong.

She raised her right fist, palm-side up, and looked down as if fascinated. One by one, she opened her fingers. Small trickles of blood ran between her fingers from three punctures in her palm, caused by the three black hairpins still sticking out of the wounds. The skin around the wounds had turned a bright, sickly orange.

"Anything else before I head out, Director?" she asked, as she had done thousands of times before. Then she collapsed, slumping in the hands of the flanking agents. They eased her to the ground. The female agent checked for a pulse and started CPR, shouting instructions to her partner. The words were nothing more than muffled gibberish to Graham. He stared blankly at Jeanine, at the wife of his dead friend, as her life drained away by the actions of her own hand.

The important battles were fought behind closed doors. And there were casualties.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, after building personnel had taken the body to the morgue and made some effort to remove the blood from the carpet, Graham sat alone in his office, lights off, glass full, trying to make sense of it all.

Jeanine's betrayal had made one thing painfully clear – while he might operate strictly by the numbers, other people did not. That led to unexpected, unpredictable behavior. Greg never would have wanted Jeanine to join Fulcrum, to help tear down what he had dedicated his life to building up, yet Fulcrum had played upon her emotions until she betrayed everything held dear by her late husband.

He had forgotten just how powerful a tool emotion could be.

This kind of thing was exactly why matters of the heart had no place in the intelligence game. Family, friendships, and lovers were nothing but weaknesses to be exploited, and Fulcrum was proving far too adept at exploiting those weaknesses, among others. Going forward, he needed to remember to factor in those kinds of possibilities into his thinking.

The truth was that he had gotten lucky. He had spent the past year knowing the CIA had leaks at the highest level, but he had never suspected Jeanine, not until his computer had gotten infected by a nasty computer virus that had somehow gotten past the layers of CIA network security. The regular IT staff determined that it had gotten to Graham's computer from an email sent by Jeanine, but beyond that they were stumped. They had never seen anything like it.

Almost on a whim, he had contacted Jeremy Cushman, a supposed computer whiz he had forcibly drafted into his IT organization, to see if he could solve the riddle. Cushman had somewhat abashedly reported that he had written the virus back when he had helped Chuck nab a Fulcrum cell. The virus had infected a computer used by a Fulcrum agent, and he had later sent Jeanine an email requesting information. Graham had verified her involvement when he made the locations of Tommy Delgado and Lizzie Shafai known to her; Fulcrum had broken them out less than twenty-four hours later.

Finding Jeanine was his first break in forever, and it could not have come at a better time. The virus had helped identify Jeanine as well as several other CIA agents as working for Fulcrum. Cushman was still sorting it all out, but the damage they had done was enormous. The good news was that the virus had identified the worst leaks, so Graham could finally start getting his house in order. Unfortunately, to do that, he needed help, and people he trusted were in short supply.

He set his glass down, pulled open a desk drawer and extracted a pair of manila folders. He set the two folders side-by-side on his desk. After proving that Jeanine was working for Fulcrum, his faith in everyone had been shaken. He had been forced to consider everyone a potential traitor. Even so, he couldn't have been more shocked at what one team had turned up.

Slowly, as if afraid the contents might bite him, he opened the folder on the left. Inside was a series of eight-by-eleven time-lapsed photographs from Monday afternoon; he paged through them. They showed Agent Walker sitting in Chuck Bartowski's lap, kissing him, staring into his eyes, running her fingertips along his face. Unless Bartowski's acting had substantially improved overnight, that kiss was more than just for cover.

Graham opened the folder on the right. Inside was a similar set of photographs, this series showed Agent Casey exiting his car and looking around before entering Drew Jennings' home.

It was all a mess. Agent Walker knew the perils of a field agent becoming romantically involved with anyone, let alone an asset. Since she had yet to mention this wrinkle in any of her reports, that left her motives unclear, but none of the possibilities were good ones. As for Agent Casey, Drew Jennings was suspected to be aligned with Fulcrum, so Casey could be joining him or investigating him. None of it really proved anything. All Graham knew for sure was that he couldn't trust either agent with any kind of certainty.

Too many questions and not enough answers. That wouldn't be the case for much longer.

He picked up a photo to stare at a happily grinning Chuck. Graham's mouth spread into a cunning smile of his own. His plan would help him learn the truth of things soon enough, and one way or another, the loose ends would be tied up.

* * *

_I seem to be saying this kind of thing a lot this year, but sorry for the long absence. Real life is a pain sometimes._

_I know many of you have been waiting to find out what happens to Chuck and Sarah next - that chapter is written and beta-approved, and will be posted in the next couple of days._

_Special thanks to Frea for beta-reading the first part of this section and keeping my characters from monologuing. All mistakes are my own._


	17. What Now?

After two days with little sleep, Chuck was slow to wake. For a long time, there was only the sensation of swimming through a thick syrupy haze, a haze that grew lighter as he struggled back towards consciousness. Then, one by one, his senses came back online. First came hearing. A whisper in the background gradually grew into a muffled roar. _Waterfall_, his sleepy mind identified. There was a waterfall nearby. Why again?

Before he could solve that puzzle, he became uncomfortably aware of the stiffness in his muscles. The sensation made him want to shift positions, but his body felt constricted. Something pinned his upper arm and intertwined with his legs, making any movement difficult. His other hand quested for more information, and found it just in front of him. _Warm. Soft._

His body demanded air, and as he drew a breath, he detected a light familiar scent. He inhaled again, more deeply this time, wanting to be filled by it. His expanding chest triggered movement against him, a stirring and a cute little noise accompanying a shifting of the weight against him.

His eyes opened to find Sarah's eyes smiling at him. He smiled back. _Happy_.

Chuck lay on his side, his upper arm providing a pillow for her head, his other hand resting on the smoothness of her hip. She tensed the arm wrapped around the small of his back, pressing their bodies closer in all kinds of interesting places. Before he could speak, she leaned her head over and kissed him.

Their lips separated. His eyes stayed closed a few extra seconds, savoring every facet of the kiss. The feeling of her skin against his overwhelmed him. Once more, his eyes opened to find Sarah's eyes smiling at him. He could get used to this.

He said, "I was about to say 'Good morning,' but I think I like your way better."

"Good morning, Chuck."

His heart swelled. The way she spoke was light-hearted and caring, a side of Sarah he'd seen all too rarely. Of course, under the covers was also a side of Sarah he'd never seen, except once when he had inadvertently stolen an illicit peek during a mission. He liked this way better, too.

She kissed him again, a bit more seriously this time. His breath caught, then quickened. Her playful mouth evoked memories of their night together, a prurient flurry of highlight clips running through his mind. Like last night, he let us his unconscious mind take over. His response was driven by instinct and fueled by passion.

And then, unbidden, the highlight reel froze on an image of Sarah pointing her gun at him. Even now, especially now, it made no sense. The image was a bucket of cold water. He slowed.

She pulled away, her eyes searching his. Words were tough. What did a guy say to his handler after he talked her out of shooting him, and they had instead ended up in bed together? It was hard to imagine anyone having a good answer. Even Dear Abby probably wouldn't have much to say.

_Dear Nerdy in Niagara- _

_You'll need to seek professional help on this one. _

_Kindest regards, Abby _

_P.S.: Please don't write again._

Unable to come up with an appropriate comment, he folded his arms around her. That seemed to work well enough. The scratchy sheets rustled atop them as she rolled over and wriggled around, squirming until her back rested against his stomach. She arranged his arms around her to ensure he held her close. For a time, worries were set aside and all was right. He thought of nothing but having Sarah in his arms, at last, as he so often had hoped could happen, someday, somehow.

In the distance, the falls roared. While he had been with her, the noise had faded into the background as other senses had demanded his attention. Chuck was surprised that such a loud and constant sound could disappear from his conscious mind, only to be noticed again later, a reminder of realities that existed outside of their haven. Those realities could only be ignored for so long.

Early morning light crept in through the shabby curtains. His eyes wandered, examining the room's faded wallpaper and dated paintings. Their haven was hardly worry-free. Last night had been about the release of pent-up emotion and adrenaline, with few words and even less thought. But there were things that he and Sarah needed to discuss, things that had been tossed aside in the heat of the moment. They, too, could not be ignored for much longer.

Sarah wasn't immune to such thoughts. He detected signs of her growing tension – a tautening of muscles, a rough edge to a breath here and there. Not ready for their interlude to end, his forearm levered against the front of her body and pulled her closer so he could plant a line of kisses along the nape of her neck. A bit of her tension fled as she pressed back against his lips, arching her neck into yet another pleasing curve to be explored.

Still, he could no longer shut out the rumble of the waterfalls. Drops of water tumbled like grains of sand in an hourglass, a constant reminder that time was passing all too quickly. As much as he wanted to pretend they could keep lying there, he knew that they couldn't. And before they could leave, he needed some answers.

His soft voice cut through the din. "Listen, Sarah–"

"I know," she said. "We have some things to talk about."

"I don't like bringing it all up, after last night and everything. But I need to understand."

"No, you deserve to know. Besides, it might affect what we decide to do from here."

His defenses rose. Despite her inability to carry out the order, the fact that she could even make that choice confused and bothered him. Sarah had always been straight with him about the job coming first, but while that had hinted at potentially bad things, he never would have left the trail for her had he imagined there was any chance she would try to kill him.

Dear Abby was going to be sending him a cease-and-desist letter before all was said and done.

Chuck pulled back from her, leaving only his forearm loosely wrapped around her midsection. The covers tried to tug him back as she shifted in response. She drew her knees towards her chest and leaned towards him, seemingly inviting him to pull her close again. He declined the invitation. This wasn't a conversation he could have while holding her close. "Tell me about the order," he said.

She lay there, unresponsive. Her body rose and fell and rose again in time with her measured breaths. Just when he was starting to wonder if he was going to need to prompt her again, she stirred, slipping a hand under her pillow. She said, "After I found your message telling me where to find you, I picked up some things from my apartment and arranged for a plane to drop me at the airport just outside of town. I went dark the minute I left my apartment, but after I landed, I decided to take a chance and check my messages. I thought if there were some small things I could manage with Director Graham, it would seem less strange when I didn't check in for a while, and that could buy us some extra time. Instead, the kill order was waiting for me."

He gave her some time, thinking there had to be more than that. Her prolonged silence said differently. "And?" he prompted.

"And I came to find you."

Bile rose into the back of his throat. His tone became as bitter as the taste in his mouth. "That's it? Really? You got the order and you decided to kill me?"

"That's what you need to understand, Chuck. It was never my decision. When I became your handler, I became responsible for your safety. I also became responsible for cleaning up if things went bad."

"Seems that last part was omitted from my asset orientation sessions."

"We suspected assets would react badly if given that information."

He had to concede the point. "So from day one you knew there was a chance you might end up killing me."

"That's a possibility with any random person off the street."

"Except you asked me to trust you."

"With good reason. My job was to protect you to the best of my abilities, and to do anything I could to keep this endgame out of play. But despite our efforts, Fulcrum became too powerful. They figured out you had the Intersect. When that happened, you became a huge national security risk, and the order was issued. It became my responsibility to carry out that order."

He couldn't get his head around it all. A dozen thoughts flitted through his mind, stretching his emotions in all kinds of different directions. Anger, confusion, and fear took turns banging around the inside of his head like grasshoppers trying to escape a jar.

He wanted to let them loose, let them fly out of him in a stream of hurt accusations. And he would have, except for one thing. The way she trailed off, Chuck could almost hear her tack on a self-admonition. _And I failed. _That brought him up short, causing him to bite back his next comment.

Sarah was obviously glad he was still alive – last night she had demonstrated that in spades – but her failure to carry out the mission genuinely stung her. The question became why.

He drew a long, steadying breath. She was trying to explain; the least he could do was to listen. He resolved not to flinch, even when the details chilled him. That resolve was tested with her very next words.

"I'd planned on killing you quickly," she said.

"Holy crap on a cracker," he said under his breath.

"It was the best choice, and the fairest to you. There was no point in delaying. Nothing I could say would have made it right."

"Was it right with you?"

"No, but I would have figured out how to live with myself another day."

"Very James Bond."

"You'd be the one doing the dying. Dealing with the guilt seemed like the least I could do." She sighed, a heavy, sad sound. "On any mission, you need to go in fully prepared to do what needs doing. If you'll need to kill somebody, you need to be ready to kill somebody. If you might need to sacrifice your life, you need to be ready to die. So I went to the hotel, ready to carry out my plan. Or so I thought."

Her body tensed as if bracing for impact. She said, "I got to the hotel, and you weren't in the room, and I found the cake, and suddenly you were there, and … I couldn't do it."

He found himself frowning as he processed the rush of words. "Is that such a bad thing?"

"That depends. How many other lives is your life worth?"

He propped himself up onto an elbow. "What?"

"Our lives aren't the only ones affected by this, Chuck. Fulcrum has plans for the intel in the Intersect, and their operations tend to involve a body count."

"But you could just hide me somewhere. You're one of the CIA's best. Our chances would have to be pretty good."

"You did a good job covering your trail, so our chances would be decent if we ran. But when the stakes are this high, it becomes a numbers game, and an individual almost never wins in a numbers game."

"Wait, you accepted the order because of the math?"

She said, "That's an oversimplification, but statistical analysis plays into it, yes."

"That sounds even worse. It makes it sound like I came out on the wrong side of a 60/40 split and off you went."

"Like I said, math plays into it, but it isn't everything. It's really more a question of knowing how these things tend to work out." She hesitated. "There's an exercise for first-year agents to illustrate why we are sometimes asked to carry out orders like this. It's not fun, but it is instructive. Do you want me to take you through it?"

"Not really, but I don't have a choice, do I?"

"Of course you have a choice. You just might not understand unless we go through it."

He looked down at her, the woman he cared about so much. No, there wasn't a choice. He still held out hope that all of this would turn out to make some kind of sense. "I need to know."

She cast a glance back over her shoulder at him. "The goal of the exercise is to create an oversimplified model and draw conclusions from it. In this case, we'll start out simple, with only two possible outcomes: Fulcrum captures you, and we elude capture. We can add other outcomes later if we think they prove useful."

"OK."

"First we need some base assumptions. What percentage chance do you think you and I would have of successfully eluding pursuit until everyone gives up?"

Chuck's lips pursed slightly. "Ninety percent. Maybe ninety-five."

"Keep in mind that there would be a massive search for us. We're talking CIA, NSA, FBI, not to mention Fulcrum and intelligence agencies around the world. You and I would vault to the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list. We'd be accused of crimes we didn't commit so our photos could be distributed to state and local authorities. There would be a large cash reward for any information leading to our capture, and people wouldn't stop looking for us for, let's say, five years."

"So, what, like seventy-five percent?"

"You have a lot of faith in me," she said, her voice carrying a hint of a smile.

"You are one of the best."

"Fine. For the sake of argument, let's say there's a seventy-five percent chance of us getting away. Now the tougher question: what kind of impact would there be if Fulcrum got the Intersect?"

He thought about that for a moment. "It's hard to say. We don't know what they're after."

"So, take what you know from your encounters with Fulcrum and extrapolate."

His eyes lost focus as he tried to recall his personal experiences with Fulcrum. Tommy had threatened to kill every person in the Buy More to get the Intersect. Chuck had found a pair of Fulcrum's cowboy boots with acid and explosive concealed in the heels, which seemed to be preparation for hijacking and possibly blowing up a passenger aircraft. The last Fulcrum agents they had encountered had been waiting for a shipment of uranium. Every step of the way, Fulcrum plans pointed towards death and mayhem. And if the intel in the Intersect facilitated any of those plans...

"Deaths, anywhere from a few to a few hundred people," he said. "A number of others would likely be affected, either by being injured or losing somebody they care about."

"That's right. It's a range, with a minimal level of casualties being pretty likely and the upper extreme being pretty scary. Also, don't forget that if Fulcrum successfully completes any missions, it's likely to have some kind of significant but negative impact on the country. We're looking to keep things simple to start, so make a conservative projection of casualties and forget the rest for now."

"Is ten about right?"

"Ten will work. Now, close your eyes, and think about the kinds of people that might become casualties. Put faces to as many of them as you can and picture them standing together in a group."

Chuck closed his eyes. He pictured a vast dark warehouse with a raised circle on the floor, spot-lit from above. Inside the circle, he started seeing the kinds of people who might be affected if Fulcrum grew stronger. An airline pilot wearing his navy blue hat and uniform, who would be killed during a hijacking. A mustached undercover agent from some Middle Eastern country, who would be tortured and killed for what he knew or what he had done. A female scientist in a white lab coat, who would be killed during a raid to acquire her top secret research. A little boy with a soup-bowl haircut, who at some point would be caught in the crossfire.

The circle kept filling until he had ten people, ten strangers, all of whom would be killed if he were caught. They stared back at him, impassively, as if waiting for him to do something. "OK."

Very softly, she asked, "Is Ellie in the group?"

"No."

"She should be. Everybody is somebody's Ellie."

He grimaced. The group shifted. The scientist vanished, and was replaced by Ellie. The little boy vanished, and was replaced by Morgan. One by one the members of the group changed, until the circle was filled with the people he cared about, including the Buy More crew and, somewhat surprisingly, Casey. Sarah, the only active participant, stood at the front of the group.

"Now remember," she said, her voice echoing through the warehouse, "you estimated we had a seventy-five percent chance of escaping. So if you flip a coin twice and it comes up tails each time, the people in the group all die."

He looked down and saw a silver dollar resting, ominously, tail-side up in his hand. The coin glinted as he moved it in his palm. Two flips of the coin. One in four, and ten people died.

She asked, "Is your life worth so much that you'd risk ten others?"

Everyone in the circle watched Chuck expectantly. Ellie looked nervous. Morgan looked scared. Big Mike looked angry. Casey looked, well, bored with the whole thing.

"Wait," Chuck said. "It's one in four that I get caught, but that doesn't mean Fulcrum gets me. A loyal agent could find me, and I'd just be killed, which is what you were going to do anyway."

"True. But seventy-five percent was a generous estimate, as were the ten casualties. We've also ignored the other people indirectly affected and the implications of Fulcrum obtaining the Intersect. But go ahead and change the model. See if you can find a way to make the numbers work."

Chuck looked at the circle of people as he tried to balance the equation in a way that would justify keeping him alive. He tried reducing the chance that Fulcrum would get him, but couldn't lower it past five percent. But if he adjusted that side of the equation, it was only fair to adjust the other side as well. The warehouse became fuller and fuller. The number of people in the circle increased. A second circle appeared, this one filled with people wounded by the attacks, physically or emotionally. Tommy Delgado stood to one side, hands in suit-pants pockets, smirking at Fulcrum's increased power. And in the background were a pair of literally distant possibilities, the kinds of missions that might be facilitated by Chuck's capture – the wreckage of an airplane, and a small nuclear device with red LED numbers slowly counting down.

There was no way to make the numbers work.

He opened his eyes. Sarah had rolled over and was propped up on her elbow, mirroring him. "That's why I accepted the order. As much as I care about you, this is about far more than you and me."

"I hadn't thought about all the impacts."

"It's a hard thing to realize until you force yourself through an exercise like this – or until you've been a spy long enough to see the consequences first-hand. The abstract always seems different than the reality. But it's not just the other people's lives, Chuck. You need to remember that there are worse things than a quick and painless death. If Fulcrum ever gets their hands on you, the extraction process would make you wish you were dead, and you'd die knowing that Fulcrum will use what's in your head to hurt innocent people."

He gaped at her, a bit horrified. "Well, I would now."

"Sorry, Chuck. You wanted to know."

"I take it back."

That brought a small, fond smile to her face.

He looked down at the threadbare comforter, looking for something to do with his hands, but judiciously decided not to touch it. "There's a problem with all this, you know."

"What's that?"

"According to all this logic, the right thing for you to do is to walk across the room, pick up the gun and shoot me. Or for me to shoot myself."

"That is exactly why a handler should never get emotionally involved with her asset. Nobody could reasonably expect you to take your own life, and an agent's logic fails once these kinds of emotions are involved." He felt her fingers and palm touch his face, and he let her direct his gaze to her. Her eyes shone back at him. "And even though I know it's the right thing to do, even though I swore I would sacrifice anything to protect my country, even though I freely accepted the responsibility of being your handler and all that entails, there is no way I could do it. Not any more. Last night was my best and only chance."

Again, the unspoken addendum. _And I failed._

It was all so bittersweet. Sarah had finally chosen him over the job, and it was tearing her apart.

And there was something else. Her posture was rigid, her breaths were shallow. Her eyes didn't have the distant look of somebody focused on self-recriminations; they were focused on him. Only then did he realize that she had managed to hide some of her emotions once again. Sarah was scared. She was scared that he couldn't get past what she had done. Now she was waiting to see how he would react.

The thing was, he finally understood the logic behind the decision. Without realizing it, he had touched upon it during their confrontation, when he made a distinction between Sarah the agent and Sarah the woman. Her choice pitted professional responsibilities versus personal wishes, and logic versus emotion. Whatever her decision, she was going to be left hurting. It was a no-win situation.

It was the Kobayashi Maru.

In Star Trek, a Kobayashi Maru was a test simulation administered to starship captains-in-training. Instructors set up a simulation where students would command a ship in a scenario specifically designed to be unwinnable. The classic case involved a choice between letting the crew of another ship perish and attempting to rescue the crew, risking both his own ship as well as the start of a war. The simulation was programmed so that there was no way to win, making the point of the exercise to evaluate a person's reaction to the situation itself. And in that regard, he couldn't fault Sarah. She had tried to remain true to her sense of responsibility, knowing all too well the consequences of failing to carry out the order. She had faltered when she saw him. In the end, her feelings for him had trumped everything else.

What more could a man ask from one of the world's top agents? The one thing stronger than Sarah's desire to do right was her desire to be with him.

He said, "Sarah, I honestly don't know whether I'm completely past everything that happened last night. I don't think it's something I can just shake off."

"Chuck, I–"

He held out his hand, gently pressing two fingers to her lips to hush her. Her eyes widened. "But I understand why you did what you did, and given enough time, I'm pretty sure I will get past it."

He stared at her for a moment to drive the point home, then rotated onto his back and slid an arm through the loop between her head and its supporting arm, inviting her into his embrace. A little gasp of relief escaped her lips. She gratefully rolled over on top of him, her upper leg crooked over the top of his legs, her head settling into a nook between his shoulder and chest. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled herself close.

He put his arms around her, leaned down and kissed the crown of her head. Her body relaxed. She closed her eyes, and for the moment at least, seemed to find some peace.

They stayed like that for a while. She sprawled atop him with closed eyes while he cradled her gently. Given everyone who was after them, it wasn't the smartest move to stay put, but sometimes wounds needed tending.

Chuck revisited memories of when he first found Sarah in the hotel room. Part of him wanted to let it all go, at least for the time being, but there were still things he needed to know so he could start to put all this behind him.

In the end, he opted to probe, but gently. "So that whole time you were pointing the gun at me, you knew you weren't going to shoot me?"

"I'd be lying if I said part of me wasn't trying to finish the job."

"Wow. That's amazing."

She opened her eyes into slits so she could look at him.

He clarified. "You seemed perfectly calm."

Her eyes shut again. "Hardly. I couldn't even answer some of your questions. My voice would have given me away."

"I couldn't tell at all. Not until the end."

"It's part of our training. Any feelings we show can be exploited, so early on we learn how to put up a front, no matter what's going on inside our head."

"Well, remind me never to play poker with you. I've never seen you that dispassionate before."

She said, "That's more my normal mode. When I was on missions with you, a key part of my job was to keep you grounded, and you relate better to an empathetic figure."

"That's a pretty clinical way of saying that you didn't want to freak me out."

"The missions tended to do a good job of that on their own."

He glanced down at her. A corner of her mouth turned up. "Oh, really?" he said, liking her playfulness. "I made it halfway across the country on my own, thank you very much. I eluded CIA, NSA, and Fulcrum agents without your help."

"So you're saying you were never freaked out?"

"Only most of the time." Her eyes popped open in time to see him grin. A similar grin grew on her face.

It faded all too quickly. "We'd better get going."

"What, and leave all this behind?"

"I need to get you somewhere safe."

"And where is that?"

She sighed. "I have no idea. But we can't stay here."

"That's too bad. This place was starting to grow on me. Literally." He gave a mock shudder and brushed off his shoulder for emphasis.

Sarah giggled. If there was a better sound in this world, he didn't know what it was.

She pushed herself up and gave him a lingering kiss. She reluctantly pulled away and said, "Mind if I use the bathroom first?"

Not quite as romantic an end as some of their other kisses, but he was hardly complaining. "Be my guest."

After giving him another quick peck for a thank-you, she sat up, turning her naked back to him as she scooted to the edge of the bed. He was slightly disappointed when she managed to retrieve her underwear and his button-down shirt without too much trouble. She slipped on the clothes, grabbed a few things from her bag and disappeared into the bathroom. Soon he heard the sound of running water.

Chuck set about grabbing the rest of his clothes from where they were strewn about the floor. He hadn't packed much clothing, so he opted to re-wear the same pants and socks. He'd need to see about reclaiming his shirt from Sarah.

The water cut off. She said, "I don't really have a plan, but our best move is probably to cross into Canada, as long as we're already so close to the border. I'll need to find you some credentials first. That'll take a bit of time."

"I've already got credentials."

"You can't use ones the CIA gave you. They'll know the minute you use those."

"I picked up a pair of fake passports in Dallas."

"Cute."

"No, really, Mei-Ling Cho met me in Dallas and gave me two fake passports. They look pretty good to me, but you may want to double-check."

She peeked around the edge of the bathroom door. Her face scanned his. "I thought you were joking, but you're not. You really called in Mei-Ling."

He flinched. "It seemed like the right thing to do. I didn't have many allies, and she owed me a favor. Desperate times call for desperate measures, etc."

"I'm not angry. I'm impressed."

It was his turn to scan her face. "Wait, really?"

"It was a great tactical maneuver. She doesn't know you're the Intersect, she's not currently aligned to any government intelligence agency, and she owes you for helping to rescue her brother." She went back into the bathroom. "You've been busy. What else have you been doing?"

His eyes lit up. "That's it!"

"What's it?"

Between his lack of sleep and his roller coaster of emotions since Sarah arrived, Chuck had completely forgotten about his own plan. "The solution to the Kobayashi Maru. We need to change the game."

"You're not making any sense."

Sarah came out of the bathroom, bag in one hand, his shirt in the other. She had completely changed clothes and looked as though she had put on make-up as well. In the same amount of time, Chuck had managed to pick up his laundry and change into a new pair of boxers. "How did you…? Never mind." He got busy putting on the rest of his clothes.

"I couldn't make out what you were saying. Something about somebody named Kobayashi?" She threw his button-down over the back of the chair before setting her bag on the bed and gathering her clothes from the floor.

"The Kobayashi Maru is a–" He cut himself off. He had enough to explain without telling her his inspiration stemmed from Star Trek. "Forget that. The kill order only came out after Fulcrum knew who I was. That means, up until that point, the risk of my capture must have been balanced by the reward of keeping the Intersect in the field."

"That's right. Graham and Beckman were reasonably happy with us, because with the Intersect, our team was the only one that was consistently successful against Fulcrum. But once Fulcrum found out who you were, that made you less of a danger to Fulcrum and more likely to be captured."

"Right, the balance got shifted. We need to shift it back."

"Sounds great. How?"

He took a deep breath. He had a fairly good idea how she was going to react to his proposal. "What if we stole the new version of the Intersect?"

At that, she dropped the last of her neatly folded clothes into her bag. She walked across the room to him, took his chin in her hands, and examined his eyes clinically.

"Um, Sarah, what are you doing"

"Checking for signs of a concussion. Did you fall and hit your head while you were escaping?"

"No, think about it, Sarah. The new version of the Intersect came online yesterday. If we–"

"Slow down. How do you know the new version is online?"

So much he needed to tell her. "Somebody sent me a package at the Buy More yesterday. There was a phone in it. Whoever sent it to me called and told me the new version of the Intersect came online yesterday in Maryland, and that I should upload the new version to figure out who the leaders of Fulcrum are."

"That could have been anyone on the phone. He could be manipulating you. He could have been lying."

"He's right about the Intersect coming online."

"How can you know that?"

"Because I found Professor Fleming."

"Professor Fleming – you mean Glass Castle? He recovered from the crossbow wound?"

"And then some. He's been working sixteen-hour days for the past three months."

Her mouth gaped. "Chuck, how the hell do you know all this?"

"Like you said, I've been busy."

Her eyes lit up in sudden understanding. "You called Cush, didn't you."

He nodded, a bit reluctantly. He had wanted to keep Cush's name out of it.

Jeremy Cushman was a top-notch computer expert who had worked for a private consulting company until Fulcrum hired the company to conduct a "security exercise". The exercise turned out to be an attempt to compromise one of the CIA's most important servers. Cush had no way of knowing he had been hired by Fulcrum or who actually owned the server in question, but that hadn't stopped Director Graham from wanting to put Cush into the ground. Chuck had convinced Graham that the CIA would be better served to use Cush to fix their security issues. Cush and Chuck had been becoming fast friends even before then, but Chuck's advocacy had sealed their friendship.

Cush was amazing. He went wherever he wanted in the CIA network as if there was no security at all. Whenever Chuck wanted to talk, all he had to do was attempt to establish an FTP connection to a particular port on a low-priority server. It was like knocking on a door. A script would notify Cush of the failed FTP attempt, and he would be in contact with Chuck within minutes. Chuck had rung that doorbell several times since deciding to go after the Intersect, and Cush had come through time and again.

Chuck said, "Cush was able to track Fleming's work habits from his use of badge and biometric scanners. He also found out that, starting on Sunday, the power consumption in the facility he works in nearly doubled. That has to be from new Intersect coming online."

"Isn't that a bit of a reach?"

"I don't think so. Not with the timing of the kill order on me."

For the first time, she seemed to take his idea seriously. "That would line up. Director Graham thought the new Intersect would be ready around now, and if the new version is online, that's all the more reason you'd be seen as expendable."

"Graham and Beckman don't think they need me any more, Sarah, but they do. Uploading the new version of the Intersect could merge the old and new data together. Assuming Fulcrum has managed to destroy some of the data from the original version, I might be the only one able to figure out who is running Fulcrum."

"Except loading the new version might not work at all. It might even mess up your mind."

"We need to take that chance. Our only other option is to run and hide, and hope the coin flips go our way."

Sarah hesitated.

"Look, if we can pull this off, we can take down Fulcrum, which is obviously great in its own right, and it will get you back on good terms with the CIA. Besides, I've wasted five years of my life before. The only thing worse than doing that at the Buy More is doing that hiding in some rat-infested hole-in-the-wall in Bangladesh. I want my life to be mine again, Sarah. I want us to have a chance to choose what comes next for us."

She stared at him. "Let me get this straight. You, Chuck Bartowski, are suggesting that we risk our lives breaking into a government facility to steal all the government's top secrets while we are being chased by dozens of agents, some of whom want to kill you and some of whom want to torture you to death, on the chance that the new version of the Intersect will merge with the old so we can take down a particularly nasty international spy conglomerate?"

"It's high-risk, but it's high-reward, too. We need to do this, Sarah. It's the right thing to do, for you, for me, for us, for everybody. It's a win-win-win-win- … I don't know how many wins it is, but it's full of win, and not in an Internet fanboy kind of way."

She mulled it over. "I'm not saying yes, but how far is the facility?"

"We can be there tonight if we drive fast."

"OK, Chuck. Right now one direction is as good as another as long as we keep moving. You can brief me on what you're thinking along the way, and we can decide later whether this really makes sense."

Chuck grin grew huge. He knew he should be scared, but somehow he wasn't. Right now, Sarah was with him, and he felt like he could do anything.

* * *

_Ed. note - The reviews made it pretty clear that some people were unhappy with how Sarah's decision to try to carry out the order. I took up the challenge and spent a great deal of time trying to make sure to get this chapter right to try to explain her motivations. (BTW, this shouldn't affect your reviews. As usual, don't hold back.)_

_I don't ask that you agree with my take. It is, after all, my job to convince you, and I do wander away from canon from time-to-time, especially with my treatment of Sarah's character. But hopefully this chapter explained my take on Sarah's thinking._

_One last thing – my next update probably won't be until next weekend. This week is a busy one for me._


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